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Unofficial stories

In lieu of abstracts, we started asking speakers for "unofficial" stories in October 2015. The following unofficial stories are published with the speakers' permission.

Republishing: Growing up in science is partnering with the Journal of Stories in Science, which publishes stories about science from students, postdocs, faculty and the public from around the world. With the speakers' help, several of the stories below have now been republished in the journal.

Joseph LeDoux (Mar 27, 2024)

Official story
Joseph LeDoux received undergraduate and master’s degrees from Louisiana State University (1971 and 1974), and a PhD from what is now known as Stony Brook University (1978). He spent ten years in the Neurobiology Lab at Cornell Medical school, and in 1989 joined the new Center for Neural Science at NYU as the first outside hire. Currently, he is a University Professor and Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at NYU in the Center for Neural Science and Psychology. He is also a Professor of Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical School. His work is focused on the brain mechanisms of emotion, memory, and consciousness. LeDoux has received international awards for his research and is also an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of several books, including The Emotional Brain, Synaptic Self, Anxious, The Deep History of Ourselves, and The Four Realms of Existence, and co-author of The Integrated Mind (1978) and is a co-author of Against Happiness (2023). LeDoux did his PhD studying consciousness in split-brain patients. Although was particularly interested in emotional consciousness in humans, the tools available for studying the human brain were quite limited in the late 70s and early 80s. As a result, chose to study how the brain controls emotional behaviors in rodents using Pavlovian fear conditioning as a tool for tracing neural circuits. Although he had a large role in shaping the “amygdala fear center” idea, late in his career he rejected this notion and offered an alternative view in which defensive behaviors occur in parallel to cognitively constructed conscious feelings of fear. He closed his lab at NYU in August 2023 and will officially retire in August 2025.

Unofficial story
My father, Boo LeDoux, rode bulls as teenager during the Great Depression, and then, after a back-damaging fall from one of the beasts, he returned to Eunice, a small town in the region of southwest Louisiana known as Cajun Country, and took over has father’s meat market. Much of his life was shaped by his notion of himself as a cowboy, which he truly was. At the age of 60, he took up bull riding again for several years, stopping only because my mother, Pris, the face of the business and the accountant, threatened to divorce him. To the extent that I had a job in the market it was to peel away the tough, inedible sheet of tissue covering the brain and remove the lead bullet with my tiny fingers—customers did not fancy chomping down on lead when they ate sautéed brains. It was intensely satisfying to pull the two halves of the brain apart, exposing a tennis-racket-looking structure and its wrinkly decoration. Later in life, I learned the tough tissue is the dura mater, the bullet was lodged in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the tennis racket is the brainstem, and its wrinkly decoration is the cerebellum. That had no impact on my career choice, but it certainly gave me a leg up when I became a neuroscientist. I never aspired to be a scientist. And no one who knew me in Eunice would’ve guessed that I'd end up in that line of work. I was a decent student, but not a great one, and science was neither one of my better nor favorite subjects.  The main thing I cared about was music. There was Cajun and country music galore in Eunice. But as long as I can remember, I loved pop music. In high school I was in rock ‘n’ roll bands, was a DJ, and dreamed of being a musician. In college, other than a “physics for dummies’” kind of class—an elective for non-majors— I took no other science courses. That was easy, since I majored in business administration, and then proceeded to get a master’s degree in marketing. Yet, less than four years later, I had a PhD for discoveries I made about human consciousness in the brains of neurological patients. After that, I spent the rest of my career working on the brain mechanisms of emotion and memory in rodents to better understand human emotional behavior. In my late 50s, my success as a neuroscientist made it possible for me to actually become a musician and even a song writer. That may seem like an odd consequence of being a neuroscientist, but that’s what happened. In 2006, I formed a band with Tyler Volk (Professor of Biology) on lead guitar, Daniela Schiller (post-doc) on drums, and Nina Curly (Daniela’s research assistant) on bass. I played rhythm guitar and wrote songs about mind and brain, a genre that came to be called “heavy mental”. We mostly played for lab parties. But one thing led to another, and we started playing in clubs in NYC and decided to record our music. The title of the first album was, of course, Heavy Mental. The Amygdaloids really caught on. In the early days, we were written about widely in the popular press the New York Times, Salon, and the Huffington Post and PNAS even had a news story titled The Amygdaloids. Our music videos have been viewed many times (one about ninety thousand times) on The Amygdaloids YouTube channel. Often when I am asked to give a lecture, the hosts request the band. I offer instead Colin Dempsey, the band’s current bass player, and my partner in the acoustic duo, So We Are. We have played acoustic versions of The Amygdaloids heavy mental catalog in Rome, Mexico City, Stockholm, and many other places. Our next gig is in Rio in June 2024. The band’s second album, Theory of My Mind, was produced in 2010 by an organization called Knockout Noise. In 2017, they decided to follow up with a documentary about my early life in South Louisiana Cajun country, my research, and my musical career. Featured were neuroscientists (Mike Gazzaniga, Eric Kandel, Daniela Schiller, Liz Phelps) and musicians (Rosanne Cash, Lenny Kaye). It can be seen on Amazon. During that same time, Lynne Kaufman, a San Francisco playwright, wrote to me saying she was working on a musical about a PTSD therapy group session and came across my research on traumatic memory reconsolidation and my music. She thought that my song Map of Your Mind might be a good fit and asked if she could use it. I told her she could use as many of my songs as she liked. As a result, lyrical content of fifteen of my songs were used to create the narrative arc of the musical. We did a staged reading in San Francisco and are currently working on a performance in New York.

Gabrielle Gutierrez (Dec 18, 2023)

Official story
Dr. Gabrielle Gutierrez is a computational and theoretical neuroscientist who has worked on a range of scientific questions. From investigating how the retina encodes compressed visual information to exploring how spike-frequency adaptation makes a population code more efficient, Dr. Gutierrez’s work aims to understand how the properties of individual neurons interact with their connectivity within a neural circuit to produce the computations that drive sensory and motor processing. Dr. Gutierrez’s academic journey began at the selective womens school, Barnard College, where she majored in Physics and minored in Applied Mathematics. She pursued a PhD in Neuroscience at Brandeis University under the mentorship of Dr. Eve Marder. Currently, Dr. Gutierrez is an Assistant Professor in the Neuroscience and Behavior Department at the place where it all started - Barnard College. In addition to designing and teaching courses that introduce the next generation of women scientists to the field of computational neuroscience, she has an active, NIH-funded research program. Beyond academia, Dr. Gutierrez is committed to scientific outreach and service to promote diversity and inclusion within her field.

Unofficial story
Gabrielle started out feeling pretty sure that she was going to be an actress or a dancer. She didn’t really stop to think about a career in STEM even though she was often the top student in her math and science classes, and she really enjoyed those subjects. Even college didn’t seem like an inevitability. Thankfully, with the guidance of some great mentors, Gabrielle found her way to majoring in physics in college. One fateful afternoon, she saw a public lecture that introduced her to the budding field of computational and theoretical neuroscience. She went to grad school for neuroscience, learned how to be an electrophysiologist, and later came back around to the thing that drew her in initially - computational neuroscience. By then, her quantitative skills had atrophied somewhat and she wasn’t sure what kind of a researcher she was or whether she was even cut out for theory. After exploring lots of different things during multiple postdocs, she finally embraced her theorist identity and found her true calling as an assistant professor at an undergraduate institution.

Susan Carey (Nov 14, 2023)

Official story
Susan Carey entered at Radcliffe College with an interest in math/science, settled on cognitive science in her junior year, graduated summa cum laude in 1964, having worked with Peter Wason, George Miller and Jerome Bruner in the earliest days of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. After a Fulbright in London, she returned to Harvard for a PhD, settling on cognitive development/language acquisition as a topic of study, working with Jerome Bruner and Roger Brown. After finishing her PhD in 1971, she was a lecturer at Harvard for 1 year, and then moved to MIT, where she taught for 24 years, then moved to NYU for 5 years, and then back to Harvard where she held a named chair for the last 23 years of her career and served as the first female chair of the Harvard Department of Psychology. Her career in developmental cognitive science was much lauded, recognized by the Nicod Prize (Paris), the Rumelhart Prize (Cognitive Science Society), the Eleanor Maccoby Award, (Cognitive Development Society), election as the fourth president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, an APA Distinctive Scientific Achievement Award, an APS William James Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Atkinson Prize (National Academy of Sciences), and election to the NAS, the American Academy of Arts of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and as a corresponding fellow to the British Academy.

Unofficial story
Susan Carey came to college from rural Illinois with no idea of what exactly she was really interested in, tried anthropology and biology and settled on cognitive studies in her junior year. After working as a research assistant for Peter Wason in the summer before her senior year, after which he returned to the University of London, she wrote an unmentored undergraduate thesis on the cost of negation in on-line processing, and also worked as a paid research assistant to Jerome Bruner on Piaget's conservation of matter phenomena during her senior year. Bruner subsequently plagiarized the paper she wrote for a graduate seminar he taught in the spring of her senior year, publishing it word for word with a footnote thanking Susan Carey "for help in analyzing the data..." This being 1964, Carey decided studying science was too far from the pressing political issues of the day (the Civil Rights Movement, the beginnings of the anti-Vietnam war movement). Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation (the terms of the day) were still years away. She went off to work with political refugees in East Africa where she met Malcolm X and then to London to study African history. She soon realized that African History involved a lot of time alone in dusty libraries. Fortunately, joining Peter Wason's lab meeting (she had never encountered the institution of "lab meeting" before) at University College London, she discovered that the issues in cognitive psychology still interested her, and she loved the collaborative nature of science. Now 25 years-old, she realized she actually had to find a job, and the only thing she knew how to do well was be a student, so she decided to apply to graduate school, where she could be supported for being a student. She wasn't really committing herself to being a scientist, which was not surprising, as she had never been taught by a woman or even heard a professional talk by a woman. Back at Harvard for a PhD, her attempts to find an advisor for work in cognitive psychology spectacularly failed (including the suicide of one short-lived advisor). She also had several experiences which gave her the message that that there was no role for women in academia. This led her back to politics, and she became active in the fledgling "second wave of feminism" the Women's Liberation Movement. The searing experience with her advisor's suicide led her to choose Bruner as an advisor, as he was sane, his work was very interesting, and he was a champion of women in academia, very unusual at the time, even as he stole from them (he plagiarized from her PhD dissertation also). Her unpublishable, unmentored, PhD dissertation was a piece of juvenalia, and the only time she even presented it in a conference, well-meaning, slightly older colleagues who were already established as leaders in cognitive psychology, took her to lunch and told her to abandon what she had settled on as her life work or she would surely fail in academia. She rejected this advice, but correctly concluded that she had humiliated herself in her first conference presentation. The next 4 or 5 conference submissions related to this work were rejected, and she got a similar message from the chair of the MIT department, when he offered her a job under the pressure of affirmative action but suggested she might prefer to be a research associate than an Assistant Professor. She said no, she preferred being an Assistant Professor. In the third prong (neuroscience, perception/computation, cognition) of MIT's forward looking "psychology" department--later renamed the Brain and Cognitive Science Department, she was constantly reminded that the third prong did not have tenure (in the words of the chair). Indeed, the brain scientists repeatedly tried to dissociate themselves from the work done in the cognitive wing of the department, including trying but failing to kick her wing out of the department. Carey's presentation will focus on coming into science during a sink-or-swim approach to graduate training, during the transition to women having a place at the table, and on dealing with failures and set-backs, (a thick skin is helpful) which continue to today, as well as the role of accident and luck in a career in science.

Vishnu "Deepu" Murty (Oct 16, 2023)

Official story
Vishnu “Deepu” Murty received his PhD in Neurobiology with a certificate in Cognitive Neuroscience from Duke University, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at New York University in the Department of Psychology. His first faculty position was in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, and he is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Temple University. His laboratory, the Adaptive Memory Laboratory, characterizes how neuromodulatory systems influence memory and memory-guided decisions. He studies these interactions in a variety of domains including reward, threat, curiosity, and agency. His work has been supported by multiple funding agencies, including the National Institutes of Mental Health, the National Institutes on Drug Abuse, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes on Aging, and the Brain Behavior Research Foundation. Outside of the laboratory, he is an advocate for queer representation in Psychology and Neuroscience as well as developing strategies for greater inclusion of under-represented populations in research.

Unofficial story
Deepu started college at Brown University motivated and starry-eyed about starting his path to becoming a doctor. In his Sophomore year, he failed Organic Chemistry 2, which was a prerequisite for applying to medical school. This failure set the first of many professional spirals. In response, he cycled through 4 different majors over the course of 2 years, which eventually landed him in Neuroscience. The summer before his senior year, he started doing research and finally, something felt right. While you would think that inspiration would be enough to pursue a career in basic science research, instead some need to be “a professional” drew him to clinical neuropsychology. After 6-months of working in this lab, he had yet another oh no movement and switched over to a related, cognitive neuroscience research laboratory. Following this new thread for basic science research, he started his PhD in Neurobiology at Duke University. Weirdly, he decided to do his PhD in Neurobiology, even though he knew his passion was psychology (a question that still has yet to be answered!). Suffering through coursework that he was not the most interested in, his PhD research gave him an immense sense of satisfaction. Despite this love for research, graduate school was punctuated with multiple episodes of depression adding more stress to an already stressful endeavor. After completing his PhD, he started a post-doctoral fellowship at NYU, where he dove deeper into memory research. While things in the laboratory were gangbusters, living alone in an isolating city triggered a few more episodes of depression. To combat loneliness, Deepu threw himself even further into his work. While this increased his research productivity, this took a toll on his personal life. After 3 years of post-doc, which included 2 years of failing on the Psychology job market (30+ applications, 5 interviews, 0 offers), he was feeling a sense of urgency to get out of New York City. He ended up confirming a position as a junior faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. Although this was not aligned with his career goals, at least he was finally in the same city as his family. Being stuck doing research that was not his passion, he slowly started treating his job as a 9 to 5. While this was a huge professional setback, he learned it was nice to have a life outside of work. He developed hobbies, a non-work friendship group, and even time for romantic relationships. But now the pendulum swung in the other direction, where his personal life was the main drive and not his career. After 2 years in a position that was not a right fit, he went back on the Psychology job market and landed a position at Temple University. While at Temple—despite accruing 10+ failed grant submissions, another episode of depression requiring a 1-month leave of absence, and many late nights in the laboratory—balance seemed to be achieved. He currently runs an active research group, pursues hobbies and friendships, enjoys a mostly healthy romantic relationship, and tries to appreciate the path that brought him here. While balance has been mostly achieved, the good times are intermixed with a smidge of existential dread about being overwhelmed forever and not having panic attacks about the well-being of his trainees. However, a healthy mixture of therapy, supportive friends, SSRIs, and sage mentorship has provided support to get over these insecurities and remember to find the fun in his job.

Kenway Louie (Oct 3, 2023)

Official story
Kenway graduated with undergraduate degrees in chemical engineering and molecular biology from MIT. He entered the MD-PhD program at Harvard Medical School, completing his PhD in biology at MIT using multi-electrode recording techniques to study memory reactivation during sleep. After receiving his MD from Harvard, he completed postdoctoral work with Paul Glimcher at the Center for Neural Science at NYU, studying value coding in animal and human decision circuits. He became a Research Assistant Professor at CNS in 2012, where his work focuses on the neurophysiological, computational, and behavioral aspects of contextual value coding and decision making. He holds a joint appointment at the NYU Langone Neuroscience Institute, where he currently serves as the Computational Core Director for the BRAIN Initiative Oxytocin U19 and Study Director for the ASTOP clinical trial on neural activity changes after interventional treatment for PTSD.

Unofficial story
Kenway was born in NYC, one of a pair of fraternal twins to parents who had fled China in the 1950s. He grew up as one of the few Asian students in Long Island suburbs, where he and his brother both excelled academically but struggled to socially adjust. This struggle was not entirely helped by skipping several grades along the way, motivated by tiger mom parenting (before the term was coined), parental distrust of public schools, and an immigrant cultural emphasis on academic and professional success. Both Kenway and his brother graduated at 15 years old and enrolled at MIT. Undergraduate life at MIT was a shock in many ways: cool kids were smarter than expected, smart kids were cooler than expected, and students like him and his brother were a dime a dozen. Kenway always imagined being a mathematician or physicist, but freshman physics quickly disabused him of that notion. Saved by freshman pass/fail, he settled on a course of biology and pre-med (to satisfy his medicine-minded mom) and chemical engineering (for his civil engineer dad), but was drawn to scientific research, working his way through research positions in x-ray crystallography (tedious) to cell biology (informative) to cell cycle proteins and oncogenetics (productive). These research experiences - along with a continuing indecisiveness about medicine versus science - led him to applying to MD-PhD programs, where he turned down MSTP funding at other schools to attend Harvard Medical School as an unofficial, unfunded MD-PhD student. Unprepared for the totality of med school, Kenway survived his first two years of classes and returned to MIT for his PhD, switching from molecular biology to systems level neuroscience and the then-nascent technology of multi-electrode recording in awake behaving rodents. Grad school was an awakening of sorts, where he discovered the joys of a variety of pursuits both academic (neural coding, computation, neural networks) and non-academic (travel, motorcycles, rock climbing). Spurred on by the prescient words of a postdoc (“You’ll graduate six months to the day you realize you are DONE with grad school”), he graduated and returned to med school, where he survived clinical rotations largely on people skills hard-earned through lab interactions rather than distant medical knowledge. To his surprise, he gravitated away from his presumed medical disciplines (psychiatry, neurology, neuroradiology) and towards surgical fields like neurosurgery - the urgency and immediate results of operations was a welcome contrast to the drawn out process of scientific research and grad school. This set up an agonizing choice at the end of medical school between neurosurgical residency and postdocs, with academic research winning in the end due to lifestyle, intellectual freedom, and a deep-seated interest in neuroscience. Kenway arrived at NYU in 2004 for a postdoctoral fellowship with Paul Glimcher, driven by a desire to examine neural circuits, cognition, and behavior in the NHP. His most cited work from that time on relative value coding and divisive normalization - which forms the basis of much of the theoretical and behavioral work he currently pursues - was initially viewed by many, including himself, as a simple test-case rotation project for a graduate student. Despite well-cited publications, grant funding, and multiple application cycles, he has yet to secure a tenure-track appointment, leading him to transition into a research faculty position. This kind of position offers both benefits (PI status for grants, mentorship opportunities with graduate students and postdocs, ability to focus on independent lines of work) and costs (lack of job security, ambiguous status in the scientific community, lower pay). Driven by a COVID hiatus, his work has shifted away from experimental neurophysiology to computational and behavioral approaches, which has opened up collaboration opportunities with scientists both within and outside of NYU. He still holds out hope for a transition to a more permanent position, focused on computational approaches to cognition and behavior, but in the meantime enjoys the time that academic research has afforded him with his young family (twins!) in the Northern Westchester suburbs.

Niels Ringstad (May 16, 2023)

Official story
Niels did his undergraduate studies in Biology at Harvard College and his graduate studies at Yale, where he earned a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Physiology for studies of membrane trafficking in the synapse. His continued interest in neurobiology led him to MIT, where he studied the nematode C. elegans with the goal of developing approaches to understand molecular mechanisms of neuromodulation using behavioral genetics. Niels joined the Skirball Institute at the NYU School of Medicine in 2009 to continue this research. He is now a Professor in the Departments of Cell Biology and Neuroscience and Physiology and a member of the Neuroscience Institute.

Unofficial story
Niels was not supposed to be a scientist. He was a decent student with some basic competencies in math, physics and chemistry, but before college Niels was charting a course towards some imagined career that involved reading, listening to music, and talking to friends. The summer before college, Niels needed a job. He found one at a nearby university in a laboratory that studied the proteins that control how your body retains salt and water. This laboratory had reinvented a classic biochemical technique to watch the activation and inactivation of salt transporters in intact tissues in real time. Niels’s job was to clean up after experiments were done, but he got to watch and experience the excitement of seeing how an experiment can reveal the invisible workings of molecular machines. The hook was set and that fall Niels declared a major in Biology. College was spent catching up on the fundamentals. There were also many opportunities to spend time in the lab. Summers were spent studying membrane biophysics, the academic year was spent studying bacterial genetics and molecular biology. Loving the lab didn’t prevent some kind of burn-out. Instead of immediately applying to graduate school, Niels took a job after college teaching math and chemistry to middle- and high-school students on Cape Cod. This was a good year. Teaching normalized not-knowing - something that did not happen at university - and made the prospect of getting back into research irresistible. In graduate school and during his post-doc Niels was again lucky in finding mentors who tolerated his quirks and supported his efforts to learn something new about biology, this time with a focus on neuroscience. As a PI, he hopes to pass on the thrill of doing experiments, which never goes away, and to give out as much support and encouragement as he received.

Adrienne Fairhall (Feb 08, 2023)

Official story
Adrienne Fairhall is a Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and adjunct in the Departments of Physics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington. She obtained her Honors degree in theoretical physics from the Australian National University and a PhD in statistical physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science, where she worked on the statistics of turbulent plumes. In her postdoctoral work she transitioned to working on neural coding. She joined the UW faculty in 2004 and now co-directs the University of Washington's Computational Neuroscience Center. She has directed the MBL course, Methods in Computational Neuroscience, and co-directs the UW/Allen Workshop on the Dynamic Brain. She has held fellowships from Burroughs-Wellcome, the McKnight Foundation, the Sloan Foundation and the Allen Family Foundation and was a Tocqueville-Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Ecole Normale Superieure in 2022. As a theorist, she collaborates with experimentalists working in a wide range of systems, from hydra to primates. Her work focuses on the interplay between cellular and circuit dynamics in neural computation, with a particular interest in adaptive and state-dependent neural coding.

Unofficial story
Adrienne grew up in Canberra, Australia; her mother was a country girl who did not finish high school, and her father was a civil servant who had taken his accounting degree at night while working full time. Her interest in science—and in science communication-- was stimulated through night lectures in physics at the Australian National University while training to work as a high school volunteer at Questacon, an Australian version of the Exploratorium. Adrienne thrived in her double major maths and physics classes at her Catholic girls’ high school, but the confidence gained by this experience crashed instantly in the first week of university honors maths when she encountered male bravado for the first time. After scrambling through sophomore and junior years to regain ground lost to panic, she graduated with first class honors in theoretical physics. A risk taker, she looked for a nontraditional place to study for a PhD in physics that would also allow discovery of the wider world, and baffled her family and friends by choosing the Weizmann Institute in Israel. This was in many ways a bigger challenge than she had anticipated, including arriving in the aftermath of the Gulf War and spectacularly failing a surprise entrance exam. After a very stressful but rich six years, when considering postdocs, Adrienne took another leap, this time toward neuroscience. An intensive course in computational neuroscience at Woods Hole led to life-changing opening of new areas of interest, a whirlwind post-course romance with her now husband of over 20 years, and the start of a postdoc with Bill Bialek in which she commenced the studies on adaptive coding with which she launched her lab at the University of Washington five years (and one baby) later. She has never taken a biology or a computer science class and is amazed to still have a job in her field.

David Sussillo (Nov 16, 2022)

Official story
David Sussillo attended Carnegie Mellon University for a BS in Computer Science and received both an MS in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Columbia University. While at Columbia, he trained under Prof. Larry Abbott in computational and theoretical neuroscience. Afterward, David did his postdoctoral work at Stanford University with Prof. Krishna Shenoy, applying his Ph.D. work to complex neurophysiological data.
After his postdoctoral research, David became a scientist in the Google Brain AI research group for six years focused on understanding how artificial neural networks function and applying those lessons to neural data. Now David is an adjunct professor at Stanford University and works at Meta Reality Labs.
In his professional pursuits, David manages a team of scientists who work to develop brain-machine interfaces for use in the next generation of computers. In his academic pursuits, David works within the connectionist paradigm to understand the ghost in the machine--how cells in our brain collectively give rise to the computations that determine our behavior. David is the recipient of a Fulbright research grant and is an internationally recognized neuroscientist with over 40 publications and three patents. His academic research is funded by the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain and the National Institutes of Health.

Unofficial story
When I was a kid, part of the lore I received about my hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was that it was the center of the national heroin epidemic in the 1970s. It made perfect sense to me--both my parents were heroin addicts.
Having drug-addicted parents meant orphanages and separation from family. With my father splitting the scene early on, and my mother's chronic stays in mental institutions, I found myself bounced in and out of group homes. I lived with hundreds of other kids of all races, colors, and creeds in similar situations. I was embraced and ignored, encouraged and beat up, mentored and forgotten. By the time I went to college, I'd been under the long-term supervision of no fewer than thirteen sets of house parents and saw family only on holidays or sometimes in the summer.
My unofficial story is one of group homes and of growing up in the chaos and neglect inherent in having addicted parents and institutional living. It's a story of poverty, survival, perseverance, and hope. I was a bright kid, but I wasn't an iron robot immune to my surroundings, or a hero from another planet, so cerebrally focused that I didn't notice anything outside myself. The profound, the beautiful, and the terrible--they all imprinted on me. If I wanted to be melodramatic, I'd say my unofficial story is a tale of life and death, of miracles and misfortune, as seen through the eyes of an orphan. But I made it, partly due to my intellect but largely thanks to many others and their thousand acts of kindness, many small and a few immeasurably large.
My unofficial story is a journey from the blighted Albuquerque neighborhood known as The War Zone, through the care of a revolving-door series of "house parents" at the Albuquerque Christian Children's Home, to a boarding school in Pennsylvania for underprivileged kids called the Milton Hershey School (featured recently in Invisible Child by Andrea Elliot), and still more house parents until I finally graduated high school.
Because of my intellectual abilities, I did well enough in high school to be accepted into Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science program. Still, the specter of my past pursued me. In college, I took the most challenging classes I could find. I could only see my value as a human being through my performance in the classroom--a notion that had sustained me during the many years of group home life. I had to discover for myself wisdom in the adage, "no matter where you go, there you are."
For reasons I couldn't understand, by age twenty-three, my life fell apart as I endured unending, intensely painful panic attacks. Finally, I got into psychotherapy and began the slow process of confronting my past. Ultimately, I got my head screwed on straight and began a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience. I met and married a wonderful woman and have been happily married for the last seventeen years. Now I enjoy a career as a neuroscientist, artificial intelligence researcher, and mentor. I sincerely hope that our understanding of the brain will one day be great enough to address the problems of mental illness and drug addiction.

John Rinzel (Oct 26, 2022)

Official story
I obtained a BS in Engineering Science (Univ of Florida, 1967) and participated in the co-op program, enabling me to work during alternate trimesters in Oak Ridge, TN where I learned and enjoyed scientific computing. My graduate career in Applied Math at NYU's Courant Institute was in two phases, MS, 1968 and PhD, 1973. It was interrupted by a two-year stint at the NIH (Division of Computer Research and Technology, DCRT) from 1968-1970. While at the NIH I came to know and collaborate with Dr Wilfrid Rall and developed an interest/passion of math/computational modeling of neurons. My PhD thesis was about analyzing models for nerve impulse propagation. After graduation I returned to the NIH/DCRT as an independent research mathematician but transferred after two years to the Mathematical Research Branch, NIDDK (Rall was a PI in the MRB). The directorship of NIDDK was very open-minded about basic research and I was well supported with postdoc positions, that would have been difficult in those days to obtain as a junior professor from either a neuroscience or mathematics department setting. The NIH was a terrific environment and I was able to pursue my own topics and establish several productive and satisfying collaborations for myself and postdocs, intramurally and extramurally, pursuing research in neuronal modeling, cell and circuit level. I also had adjunct teaching positions at the Univ of MD and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. In the mid-90s I was recruited to NYU, with a joint appointment in the Center for Neural Science and the Courant Institute a perfect fit for me. Over these past 25 years my working group and I have collaborated with several different neuroscientists, many here at NYU, developing neuromechanistic models, especially in auditory processing. I teach in both departments. New opportunities arose here at NYU for my working group -- to carry out experiments -- both electrophysiology (auditory brain stem, in vitro, e-phys rig courtesy of Dan Sanes) and human behavior in auditory perception (psychophysics in our own sound booth).

Unofficial story
I grew up in a small town near Milwaukee. In Catholic school through grade eight I was not a diligent student but restless and oppositional. Going to high school was an awakening; I started to like learning and even turn away from my dreamy aspiration to become a long-haul truck driver in order "to see the world." We moved to Florida's west coast into a primarily retirement community at the start of my junior year. During this huge adjustment I developed into a serious student, although still somewhat antagonistic and primarily interested in hot cars, portraying American Graffiti in Clearwater. Like most of my college-headed peers I applied to one of the state schools, University of Florida. I chose mechanical engineering as a major but became disillusioned with it during sophomore year.

Feeling a need to get direct exposure to what engineers "really do" I entered the co-op program. My position at Union Carbide in Oak Ridge turned out not to be in engineering but rather in the computer center. We had state-of-the-art IBM 7090 mainframes having all of 32K RAM. I was in a numerical analysis and scientific computing group. I loved it. At UF, I switched my major to Engineering Science, more theory-oriented. My research mentor at UF (who came from academics in NYC), pushed strongly for me to apply to the Courant Institute. I was awarded a Computing Assistantship at COURANT (there were very few TAs in math) ! Perfect for me !

The first year: my bride Cathy (an Oak Ridge girl) took an office job at the Metropolitan Museum, I studied constantly, we joined protests against the raging VietNam War, and I passed my written qualifier exam in early 1968 and my HOT 64 Chevy Malibu was stolen in Queens. THEN in March 1968, draft deferments for grad students were terminated. My life trajectory was detouring. After a good bit of scrambling I applied for and was accepted to become an officer in the US Public Health Service and serve at the NIH computer research center in Bethesda. Tony Fauci and many others of us 'yellow berets' were at the NIH; it almost had a campus atmosphere. I knew nothing about and had no particular care for biology or medicine. My first project was to help develop algorithms for spike separation (ask me). This challenge did not relate to anything familiar in my training and it all seemed so ad hoc/heuristic. I pleaded with the group director ("I hate this project") if I could be part of some effort that involved mathematical physics. This very kind director introduced me to Wilfrid Rall, a PI in the "Diabetes Institute" (now NIDDK), and allowed me to pursue a project with Rall fulltime: developing solutions for voltage response to localized inputs on neuron models with branching dendrites including, OMG, input to a dendritic spine. This was like a dream Rall was super kind, super smart with amazing physical intuition, modest and mentoring. I developed a very close relationship with him and found my passion in this endeavor and, so timely, as the field of computational neuroscience was emerging.

I returned to Courant in Fall 1970 (having satisfied my military obligation without being in uniform) to finish my PhD so that I could pursue my new passion. Math biology was growing at Courant and my PhD advisor, Joe Keller, was involved. Joe was among the world's top applied mathematicians (for decades) and suggested to me a problem about stability of the traveling impulse solution to nerve conduction equations, like the Hodgkin-Huxley cable equations. Of course, I knew that I had to pass oral quals and that was stressful (ask me), all that mathy analysis stuff. After passing orals, I pursued full time the stability question. I succeeded at that and learned so much from being around the Keller gang (ask me). NOTE: I learned from both of my mentors the value of formulating and analyzing idealized models.

I completed my PhD in 4 yrs (1973). Math Biology was a hot topic in applied math and I was among the very few PhDs with applied math and theoretical-biology experience. I had good job offers in a tight academic market then: U MD and RPI as well as two different research labs at Los Alamos and the NIH (computer research center). I chose NIH. Wil and I wrapped our findings into two major papers and some conference proceedings. Through Wil I was then building contacts with the neuroscience and biophysics communities. However, by 1975 I was feeling that the computer division was not a growth situation for me. I was offered a transfer to the MRB, as a tenured PI. That transfer opened the door for me to establish my working group of postdocs, visitors and even to host PhD students at their thesis-research phase and without having to obtain research grants. The next 20 years were exciting and satisfying; I couldn't have been in a better situation. In 1981 I became Chief of the MRB (now called the Lab of Biological Modeling). Among my personal working group over the years were Bard Ermentrout, Xiao-Jing Wang, Shihab Shamma, Victoria Booth, Rob Butera, and others in, or previously in, the MRB: Gordon Shepherd, Idan Segev, David Lipman, Alan Weinstein, I was maybe Growing Up. But the NIDDK intramural directorship changed (early 90s??), becoming more focused and boundaries were developing.

It was timely that an NYU search for interdisciplinary positions involved Dave McLaughlin with Tony Movshon exploring candidates for a computational neuroscience joint appointment. I was contacted and one thing led to another and Cathy and I found ourselves back at NYU in 1997, but with a house and many friends back in Bethesda; our sons had completed college. During our first year Cathy realized that she terribly missed our MD community and her professional stature in the excellent Montgomery County elementary school counseling program. Hence began our two-city arrangement, allowing us to spend summers and lots of other times together in NYC or Bethesda and with our sons (who laid roots in NYC).

Have I Grown Up? Here, at NYU, my research has expanded into new areas, including involvement in and directing experiments - that would have been hard to arrange at the NIH. There's still a lot that I want to explore and learn. I feel incredibly fortunate and grateful for the colleagues I've had at the NIH and NYU, truly giants professionally, generous and supportive on personal levels. I look back at my co-oping and 2-years of draft-evasion at the NIH as extraordinary 'internships' enabling me to identify avenues that I chose to by-pass and to find a passion, and lucking out that someone would pay me to pursue it.

Roozbeh Kiani (May 31, 2022)

Official story
Roozbeh Kiani is an Associate Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at New York University. He received his PhD from the University of Washington and performed his post-doctoral research at Stanford before joining NYU in 2013. Prior to starting his PhD, he completed his medical training in Iran. Kiani investigates the neural computations that underlie visual perception, perceptual decision making, and cognitive control. His research is supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain. For his scientific achievements, he has received a number of awards and honors, including the Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the McKnight Scholar Award, the Pew Scholarship in Biomedical Sciences, and most recently the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences. Kiani is also a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors at the National Eye Institute.

Unofficial story
Born and raised in Iran, Roozbeh experienced a tumultuous childhood in the midst of post-revolution social unrest and war. But it was a happy childhood too. Roozbeh's family frequently went camping, hiking, and fishing in the mountain ranges south of the Caspian sea. Roozbeh puzzled over everything he saw in those trips: what causes rock formations, how can one tell the distance of nearby lightning, how do the fish breathe, why do we get altitude sickness, ... At school, he gravitated toward sciences to understand the laws that govern nature. Solving his nature puzzles made him happy, and his extensive but haphazard collection of extra-curricular knowledge came handy in the last year of high school when he attended the International Chemistry Olympiad. Through a lucky chain of events, Roozbeh succeeded in the national selection exams for the Iranian team and participated in the international competition, which was held in China. The Iranian team did quite well that year, and Roozbeh won the top gold medal of the competition. But the most thrilling aspect of the competition was the opportunity to meet peers from tens of different countries and to learn about their customs, traditions, and languages. Roozbeh returned home with a deep appreciation of the beauty and power of diversity.

After returning from the chemistry olympiad, Roozbeh started his medical studies in Tehran, despite objections from his father, a medical doctor, who advised him to pursue science. But Roozbeh did not really know what he wanted to do and thought medical school would expose him to new experiences, while giving him time to figure himself out. In a physiology course in medical school, he was introduced to neuroscience and fell in love with it. He joined a group of likeminded medical students in Tehran who gathered weekly to read neuroscience textbooks and discuss papers. Around the same time, Hossein Esteky, who had recently completed his post-doctoral studies with Keiji Tanaka in RIKEN, returned to Iran with the intention to build the first non-human primate electrophysiology lab in the country. Roozbeh was lucky enough to join Hossein's group and under his guidance contributed to building the setups and starting the first projects in the lab. He loved the experience and learned so much from it. However, he struggled to meet the demands of a full time medical internship and his ongoing experiments. He barely had time to eat or sleep, often leaving his apartment before 6 am to rush to the hospital and returning past midnight after his experiments. A few things helped him survive this schedule for two years: Hossein's fatherly support, Keiji's encouragements, friendship and rich intellectual interactions with other lab members, and of course chocolate.

After finishing medical school, Roozbeh applied to graduate programs and was rejected everywhere. He was shaken but cared too much about neuroscience to give up. He traveled to the US to present his findings at the SfN meeting, hoping that he would also find an opportunity to meet his scientific heroes and maybe convince them to give him a chance. The face to face meetings changed everything. A few months later, he joined Mike Shadlen's lab at the University of Washington. It was an ideal environment and Roozbeh had so much to learn from Mike, his collaborators and students. Free from the medical school demands and guided by Mike's brilliance, Roozbeh tackled several difficult questions. More than half of his experiments failed due to technical complications. However, the successful experiments were also those that he cared the most about. He defended his PhD and moved to Stanford for his post-doctoral studies in Bill Newsome's lab. Working with Bill expanded Roozbeh's horizons. Neuroscience was in the midst a transition, breaking away from the single neuron tradition and focusing increasingly more on the dynamics and interactions of neural populations. And there was talk of a BRAIN Initiative to usher in a new era of rapid advance in neuroscience. Bill's wise and compassionate leadership played an important role in shaping these transitions and the BRAIN Initiative itself. It also provided an unparalleled educational opportunity for Roozbeh to figure out what he wanted to do in his own lab.

Roozbeh joined NYU in 2013 to start his lab in the Center for Neural Science. He greatly admires the intellectual tradition of CNS and has served in a variety of departmental responsibilities to strengthen the community. Roozbeh's lab explores the neural mechanisms of flexible decision making in the primate brain. He still puzzles over everything, while trying to be a good friend and advisor for his lab members and a good father for his four year old son.

Anne Urai (May 3, 2022)

Official story
Anne Urai received her undergraduate degree in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy at University College Utrecht in 2010, followed by a masters in brain and mind sciences at University College London and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. She then pursued her doctoral research with Tobias Donner at the Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf and University of Amsterdam, investigating how our previous choices bias the way we interpret later information, and how this process is affected by the confidence in our decisions. Her PhD was awarded the NVP brain and cognition thesis prize, specifically for its combination of interdisciplinary methodology and open science approaches. As a postdoctoral fellow in Anne Churchland's lab at Cold Spring Harbor in New York, she studied the neurophysiology of decision-making using high-density neural recordings in the mouse brain. During this time she was a core member of the International Brain Laboratory, working with a global team of systems and computational neuroscientists to assess the reproducibility of systems neuroscience. She joined Leiden University in The Netherlands as an Assistant Professor in 2020, and was awarded tenure in 2022. Anne Urai's research focuses on the neural basis of decision-making across mammalian species, and the interaction between learning and perception. A current focus of her work, funded by an NWO Veni grant, is on changes in neural and behavioral noise across the lifespan.

Unofficial story
Anne had a careless childhood, was good at school, but could never quite decide on her passions: she dropped high-school physics and chemistry in a streak of rebelliousness, only to realize her mistake a year later and catch up over the summer break. In her first semester at university, she randomly signed up for several interesting-sounded courses and got into cognitive neuroscience and philosophy. She loved both of them, deciding on the spot that she'd solve all of psychology by studying the brain. Anne spent her exchange semester travelling and eating her way through China, and another year working soul-crushing sales jobs, herding sheep in France and ultimately following her boyfriend to backpack through Asia. In a hot Moroccan internet cafe, she read that someone would pay her to live and study in London and Paris for two years, which seemed too good to true.

During her masters, Anne pursued her fascination for consciousness research (usually reserved for retiring professors) which mostly involved staring at EEG wiggles in windowless rooms. As a friendly collaborator was fixing her atrocious Matlab code, he off-handedly mentioned that Tobias Donner had just started a lab in Amsterdam - conveniently close to the city where said boyfriend had just started a new job. With her heart racing she approached Tobias at a meeting, didn't faint, applied for a fellowship, and started her PhD in his group.

Having made most of her MSc thesis figures in Excel, she suffered serious imposter syndrome, but discovered she actually quite liked the technical and programming parts of the job. She passed through a serious crisis halfway through the PhD: her initial proposal turned out to be severely underpowered, psychology's replication crisis was in full swing, her advisor's lab had moved to another country, and she hadn't published a single paper. Her advisor's gentle persistence, many yoga classes and an adopted cat helped her follow through, and Anne decided she'd give postdoc life a chance. After getting stuck in a snowstorm when interviewing at CSHL, she accepted the offer to join the Churchland lab and then got married, finished and defended her PhD within a frantic 6-months.

Coming from a background in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, it was both frightening and exhilerating to work with 'real' neuroscientists. Anne had to learn soldering, surgery and bluffing her way through genetics. She loved being a part of the (then early-stage) International Brain Lab, but started feeling terribly homesick after 1.5 years on Long Island. Just as she prepared to spend the summer doing data analysis in NYC, Covid-19 hit. Bored at home in lockdown, Anne opened a long-forgotten 'Jobs' email folder and saw a vacancy for a combined psychology teaching and research position in The Netherlands. Within short succession she then found out she was pregnant, she got the job, and the Churchland lab would be moving to California. Choosing her rainy, flat home country over sunshine, she hurried to finish experiments and returned home just in time for maternity leave.

So far, Anne has survived her first year of sleep-deprived parenthood and her assistant professorship, which was turned into a tenured position by happenstance (i.e. union negotiations). While getting settled into faculty life, she regularly experiences existential dread and wonders if writing scientific papers is what she should be doing for the next 35 years. Since her postdoc in the US she's increasingly concerned about the climate crisis, spending her evenings thinking about decarbonizing academia and worrying about the future.

Tanya Sippy (Apr 5, 2022)

Official story
Tanya Sippy got her B.S. in neuroscience at UCLA where for her undergraduate thesis she studied synaptic transmission under the mentorship of Felix Schweizer. After taking a gap year to finish up her research project in the Schweizer lab, Tanya matriculated in Columbia University's MD/PhD program. There, her thesis work in Rafael Yuste's lab focused the role of interneuron subtypes in shaping cortical activity. For her postdoctoral work, Tanya went to the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland where she studied sensorimotor transformation in the basal ganglia. After her postdoc, Tanya completed her clinical training in psychiatry at NYU and stayed at NYU to start her lab in October of 2019. Tanya is the recipient of the Howard Hughes undergraduate research scholar award, the NIH Ruth Kirschstein NRSA, the Burroughs Career Award for Medical Scientists, the Whitehall Grant, and an NIH NINDS R01.

Unofficial story
Tanya was born in Orange County, California to parents who immigrated from India. From the time she could remember her parents, in typical Indian fashion, ordained that she would become a doctor. But her parents also recognized her love for dance and enrolled her in her first class at age 7. After one class she was hooked and spent the next 14 years more committed to dancing than to her studies, a fact that caused a lot of friction between her and her parents. As a senior in high school, she finished her requirements to graduate early, dropped her AP classes and drove every day after school to a dance studio in North Hollywood (1.5 hours north of the OC) where she was awarded a scholarship meant to train professional dancers (she did all this without her parent's consent or them realizing what she was up to). The tension between her and her parents and her own internal struggle to find her career path culminated when she was a sophomore at UCLA, and letter warning of academic dismissal was sent to her home address and opened by her mother. At that point, Tanya knew she had to make a choice: doctor or dancer?

It didn't happen overnight, but a combination of a solid friendship with a fellow student who was passionate about neuroscience and a gifted organic chemistry professor along with a physical injury steered Tanya in the direction of medicine. To better her chances of medical school admission, she applied to work in research labs at UCLA and was very lucky to work with Felix Schweizer. It didn't take long for her to realize that she was not really a doctor at heart but a scientist. Tanya was quickly persuaded to apply for MD/PhD programs and, having developed an obsession with NYC, she was thrilled to be accepted at Columbia. While medical school was a blast, her thesis years were rocky to say the least, and she was unsure if she would continue in neuroscience after she finished her dual degree.

Ambivalent about what do after graduation, Tanya followed her heart to Europe (more on this later...) Luck was on her side again when Carl Petersen, whose lab was at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, offered her a postdoctoral fellowship. At first, Tanya thought Switzerland might be boring and sterile, but she quickly grew to appreciate the country, its central location in Europe, and the rich resources and keen mentorship the Petersen lab provided; her 21 month postdoc was absolutely incredible both professionally and personally. Rediscovering her passion for science and growing to love European culture put her at another crossroads: should she leave Europe and her postdoc to go back to the States to pursue medical training? Ultimately, residency back in NYC is what she chose but had a hard time not looking back. She still visits the Petersen lab and the EPFL every year to get a dose of fresh Swiss air and energy of the Institute.

Residency in psychiatry did provide Tanya with the training she needed to bring her work more focused on translation. She met Stephen Ross who was starting clinical trials using psilocybin to treat anxiety in cancer patients, and began working with him to broaden the scope of his work to include discussion about brain mechanisms that might be responsible for the therapeutic effects of these drugs. After starting her lab an NYU, she became associate director of a newly found training program in psychedelic medicine and this is now an active area of research in her lab. Almost unconsciously, her main research platform focuses on how learned sensory stimuli guide our ongoing actions, the fundamental biological process that underlies dancing. And where she lives in Manhattan is a stone's throw from the best dance studios in the world enabling dance to continue to play a formative role in her life.

Stephon Alexander (Feb 28, 2022)

Official story
I am a professor of physics at Brown University. I am a theoretical physicists whose research is at the interface of early universe cosmology, particle physics, quantum gravity and computational physics. I also engage in interdisciplinary research in the mathematics of music and physics. I did my B.S in physics and a minor in sociology at Haverford College. I also hold two Masters degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics and my Ph.D in Physics from Brown University. I did my first Posdoctoral work at Imperial College, London and the second one at the Stanford University Linear Accelerator Center. I previously held faculty positions at Penn State, Haverford College, Dartmouth College. I am currently the president of the National Society of Black Physicists.

Unofficial story
I was born in Trinidad, a part of the twin Island republic of Trinidad and Tobago. My family immigrated to the Bronx NY when I was eight in 1979. I attended P.S 16, JHS 142 and De Witt Clinton High School, all in the Bronx and received a first rate public school education. My upbringing in the Bronx is pivotal in shaping me as a scientist. My neighborhood, middle and high schools, were infused with the five elements of hip hop culture. As a teen, I engaged in a little grafitti, and producing hip hop beats at strong city studios (Rocky Bucano, Afrika Bambatta, Jazzy Jay). I was also influenced by Avant Garde jazz and am mainly a self taught Tenor and Soprano Sax player (though I received mentoring from Ornette Coleman and Will Calhoun). During my postdoc years, I was introduced to Brian Eno at a Quantum Gravity Cocktail party. Brian played a major role in enabling me to make connections between my physics theorizing and jazz improvisations. This ultimately led to my book, The Jazz of Physics. I also managed to produce a critically acclaimed electronic Jazz album with Rioux (aka Tristan Arp), entitled Here Comes Now. For over a decade I was a comptetivie 800 meter and cross country runner and never got to run my dream time of 1:50 in the 800. I now walk for exercise, due to overuse injuries from competitive running. I have engaged a years of Zen practice (on and off) and am an avid reader of both eastern and western philosophy. I am blessed to be the father of a 14 year old daughter who lives in Reykjavic, Iceland. She visits me twice a year and we are great pals.

Will Adler (Jan 31, 2022)

Official story
Will is the Senior Technologist in Elections and Democracy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, where he works to ensure that American elections are fair, accessible, and secure. Before joining CDT, Will worked on tech issues in the office of U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. He also worked at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project at Princeton University, advancing the causes of redistricting reform and open election data. He has published pieces in numerous peer-reviewed journals and popular press outlets, including the New York Times, FiveThirtyEight, and Scientific American. Will holds a BA in Psychology from Carleton College and a PhD in Neuroscience from New York University.

Unofficial story
Will took a fascination to the mind when he took AP Psychology in high school. At his quirky liberal arts college, he majored in psychology but had a lot more fun in his studio art classes. Despite an aptitude for math and a lifelong interest in computers, he avoided math and computer science courses in a foolish attempt to transcend his nerdiness and hang out with the cool art kids. After college, he worked in a neuroscience lab to see if it was something he could see himself doing as a career; he liked it, and so he applied to grad school.
He started school at NYU, thinking that behavioral electrophysiology was going to be his thing. After starting a rotation with the one lab that interested him at NYU, it quickly became clear that it was not a good fit. He became panicked that grad school wasn't going to work out for him. He was also intimidated by his fellow grad students, who all seemed to be mathematical and programming geniuses - seemingly a prerequisite for succeeding at NYU. A few months in, uninterested in most of the labs, he was reconsidering the whole thing and thinking about dropping out. He then started a rotation in a lab focused on Bayesian modeling of behavior. The PI, being new to NYU, may have been somewhat desperate to stock his lab with grad students - why else would he accept a student who had never studied statistics or programming? The PI assigned Will a rotation project about human confidence reports, assuring him that it would be a short and focused project. The project instead took 4 years, constituting Will's entire dissertation. Halfway through grad school, Will became obsessed with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. After the election, Will's interest in a science career plummeted to a record low. Instead of focusing primarily on his research, he started organizing NYU scientists to think about how to respond to the new American political reality. This effort became ScAAN, the Scientist Action and Advocacy Network. Will's PI was extremely supportive of this new effort - he helped organize the group and remains a key member.
After grad school, Will pivoted from science to elections policy, joining a group that works to end gerrymandering (i.e., politicians drawing district lines, in a clear conflict of interest). He then did a one-year fellowship for scientists in the U.S. Senate, writing pointed letters on behalf of a prominent U.S. Senator. The fellowship was an eventful one, marked by the Senator's presidential run, an impeachment trial, some exciting wins, and the start of the pandemic.
He now works at a nonprofit focused on individual rights online. His work involves making elections more secure, accessible, and fair, and finding ways to fight election disinformation and solve America's crisis of distrust in democracy. (He sometimes wonders if understanding consciousness would have been a more achievable goal.)
Will and his wife live in Washington, DC, where they both grew up. They live with their two cats, whom he trained to use the toilet - perhaps Will's proudest accomplishment in the behavioral sciences.

Liina Pylkkänen (Nov 10, 2021)

Official story
Liina Pylkkänen is a Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at New York University. She is the director of the NYU Neurolinguistics Laboratory and a co-director of the Neuroscience of Language Laboratory at NYUNYC and NYU Abu Dhabi. She also directs the magnetoencephalography (MEG) facility in the Psychology Department of New York University. Prof. Pylkkänen received her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and conducted her post-doctoral work at New York University. Her research addresses the brain bases of language processing, with a focus on semantic cognition. Starting in the late 1990's, she and a handful of other researchers began to pioneer the use of MEG to characterize the brain mechanisms of language. Today, she has generated a systematic body of MEG research on multiple linguistic processing levels. This year, she was elected as president of the Society of the Neurobiology of Language and has in recent years spent significant effort on science communication, for example by starting a public YouTube channel on the neurobiology of language and a lab podcast.

Unofficial story
I grew up in Tampere, Finland, as the only child of a single mother, who was a nurse. As soon as I started a foreign language in school, at the age of 8, I knew I had a talent for language. I freaked out my English teacher with my perfect American accent - he was teaching in a British accent, but I liked the one I heard on TV better, and somehow was able to copy it effortlessly. I took the rather typical load of four foreign languages over the years, and at the end of high school, told my guidance counselor that I wanted language to be my job, somehow. She told me that language shouldn't be the core of my job, rather, I should find a career in which I could use a lot of languages. I said no, language will be my job. So I applied to the English Philology department in the University of Tampere, and made it, which was a huge accomplishment since the acceptance rate to that program was extremely low. There I found out that Linguistics exists, and immediately applied to be an exchange student in the US, since it didn't exist very much in Finland. I left Finland when I was 20 and landed in the University of Pittsburgh in fall 1994. I felt intellectually born and I immediately knew that I was not going to go back to Finland. But figuring out a way to stay past my exchange year was a real struggle. During my exchange year, I was taking MA classes at the Pitt Department of Linguistics, so I thought I should be an MA student there. But I was rejected, since I didn't have an undergrad degree. I fought to get into that program like my life depended on it, sitting in the Dean's office explaining my passion, and eventually it worked! But I still had no funding. By the end of the year, I had managed to secure half-time funding working in a computational linguistics lab and then took a loan from Finland to make up for the rest. After that, things went smoothly, my funding was extended to full time, and I got in to all the PhD programs I applied for. I arrived at MIT wanting to do nothing but formal semantics, but after the first year, I needed a summer job, and an RAship was available in an MEG lab that had just arrived to the department and the rest is history! The hardest struggle of my personal and professional life, by far, has been to have a child. Throughout my Assistant Professor years, I was completely drugged up on fertility treatments. It's a miracle I was able to have a straight thought. We knew our son would be called Nooa and our daughter Nella. One month after I got tenure, I was finally also pregnant. That year, we also received funding from the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute to start our lab there. Today, together with my husband-bestfriend-colleague-coPI, I have an 11-year old son Nooa and an 11-year old lab NeLLab (Neuroscience of Language Lab), our two greatest joys.

Nancy Kanwisher (Oct 7, 2021)

Official story
Nancy Kanwisher received her B.S. and Ph.D. from MIT, working with Professor Molly Potter. After a postdoc as a MacArthur Fellow in Peace and International Security, and a second postdoc in the lab of Anne Treisman at UC Berkeley, she held faculty positions at UCLA and then Harvard, before returning to MIT in 1997, where she is now an Investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a faculty member in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, and a member of the Center for Minds, Brains, and Machines. Kanwisher uses brain imaging and other methods to discover the functional organization of the human brain as a window into the architecture of the mind. Kanwisher has received the Troland Award, the Golden Brain Award, the Carvalho-Heineken Prize, and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow teaching Award from MIT, and she is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. You can view her short lectures about human cognitive neuroscience for lay audiences and newcomers to the field here: www.nancysbraintalks.mit.edu.

Unofficial story
I grew up in Woods Hole where nearly everyone was a scientist (well, all our dads were, only a very few moms). But I wanted to be a journalist, and dropped out of grad school several times to try it. Once I took a summer off interning at the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco. Another time I flew to Managua at the peak of the Contra war, faked myself a press pass, hitch hiked all over the country in army jeeps, and hung out at the Hotel Intercontinental pool where the US spooks running the war out of Honduras used to hang out. I think the main reasons I didn't become a journalist are: i) I dont write fast or well enough, ii) my amazingly patient and understanding graduate advisor Molly Potter took me back after each of these daliances, and iii) my partner received the journalism fellowship we both applied for after our Ph.D.s and I did not. At the time I was furious, but it has turned out fine. I still cannot believe my luck to get to study the human mind and brain, and to work students and colleagues who blow me away every day with their kindness and intellect.

Christine Constantinople (Sep 15, 2021)

Official story
Christine holds a BS in Neural Science from New York University, where she did research in Mike Hawken's lab and was also a research technician in Lynne Kiorpes' lab. She received her PhD in Neurobiology and Behavior from Columbia University, working with Randy Bruno to study thalamocortical circuits in the rodent whisker system. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, with David Tank and Carlos Brody, where she studied decision-making in rats. She joined NYU as an Assistant Professor in the Center for Neural Science in 2019, and her research examines neural circuits supporting value-based decision-making. Christine has received a number of distinctions including the NIH Pathway to Independence Award, the NIH Director's New Innovator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Klingenstein-Simons Neuroscience Fellowship.

Unofficial story
Christine grew up in New Jersey, with two siblings and many cousins in a large extended Italian-American family, which is the main reason she has not made it very far (geographically). She was very passionate about international relations and politics, and when she attended college at NYU, she interned in the local government, but became disillusioned about whether she could really make a difference in the public sector. At the same time, she serendipitously took a course called Brain & Behavior, which was taught by Mike Hawken. She loved it! She asked Mike if she could work in his lab, he agreed, and this experience changed her life. She switched her major to Neural Science, and her time as an undergrad at CNS was wonderful. She could not believe that academia was a viable career option (you can get paid to ask questions that you think are interesting, and also wear jeans to work?!), and she became fascinated by the culture and attended as many seminars as she could. By the end of her undergrad, she was set on going to grad school to study cortical circuits. She was accepted to several programs, but she decided to attend Columbia because she was dating someone in NYC. Shortly after starting grad school, Christine broke up with said boyfriend, but enjoyed her lab rotations. She then joined Randy Bruno's lab, which was a great fit for her technical and conceptual interests. In Randy's lab, Christine did 20 hour experiments that often yielded no data. Those experiments were grueling but earned her street cred. For her post-doc, she emailed David Tank and Carlos Brody, but they ignored her. So she went to SfN, hung out at the Tank lab posters, and introduced herself to David. Eventually they hired her to work on a new system for 2p imaging in rats. Christine learned a ton from this experience, but the experiments were extremely challenging. After struggling for several years, Christine felt that she would never get a job, was disillusioned with science and herself, and told her mentors that she was quitting. She applied to be an astronaut and considered other career options. Luckily, her mentors were kind enough to let her start a new project, and Christine was much happier and decided to stay in science. She was rejected from the space program, but she feels super fortunate to be back at CNS, and has really had fun setting up her lab and watching people's projects develop. She thinks the traits that have served her best are her resilience and sense of humor (mostly about herself).

Clinton Cave (Wed 18, 2021)

Official story
Clinton Cave is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Middlebury College. He arrived at Middlebury in 2018 after completing his Ph.D. in Neuroscience and post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. Clinton conducted post-baccalaureate research atthe University of Colorado and holds a B.A. in Psychology from Yale University. As a graduate student in the laboratory of Shanthini Sockanathan, his research efforts expanded the known roles of GDE2, a cell-surface enzyme expressed in the nervous system. Using functional genetic approaches in mice, his work demonstrated that GDE2 also plays a crucial role for neuronal survival in the postnatal nervous system, heralding a new research direction for the lab. As an independent investigator, Clinton runs a laboratory at Middlebury College mentoring undergraduate researchers. His group examines the molecular mechanisms regulating embryonic progenitor patterning, neurogenesis, and cell fate decisions through the lens of GDE signaling. Clinton is a published author in Neuron, Development, MolecularNeurodegenration, and his laboratory is supported by grants from the NSF and NIH. In 2020, Clinton was selected as a Next Generation Leader by the Allen Institute for Brain Science, highlighting his research accomplishments and his work to integrate open access datasets into the classroom.

Clinton is also dedicated educator, contributing to both the undergraduate and graduate curricula while at Johns Hopkins. At Middlebury, Clinton teaches four courses for the college's increasingly popular neuroscience major. He teaches the lecture and laboratorysections of "Fundamentals of Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience" and "Fundamentals of Behavioral Neuroscience." These are two core survey courses that cover multiple sub-disciplines within neuroscience. The former describes membrane physiology, receptor biology, synaptic plasticity, neural metabolism, glial biology, and offers laboratory components on whole cell electrophysiology, action potential conduction, sensory adaptation and fluorescence microscopy. The latter course assembles a range of topics from neural coding to behavioral genetics, addiction and memory, and provides laboratory sessions on comparative neuroanatomy, mouse and rat behavior, and human electroencephalography. Clinton also teaches an upper level elective on neurodevelopment, promoting students' ability to engage with primary literature; as wellas an elective on the history of neuroscience, a course that contrasts and contextualizes the lives of scientists versus the impact of their works.

Unofficial story
"Do I belong here?" That's a question I frequently asked myself during freshman year of college. I had always done well academically in high school, and I entered college with a deep curiosity about the natural world. However, I found that my passion and enthusiasm for STEM was not reflected in my grades. My transition to college was very much the proverbial big fish moving from a small pond into the sea. At the time I hadn't realized how much of my identity and self-worth was hinged on academic performance-far too much. I worked hard over the next two years to find my footing and right-the-shipas it were. And it worked! By the second semester of my junior year I was earning straight A's again, with two courses even taken at the graduate level. But these self-imposed pressures to perform were not sustainable. My senior year, I suffered a major depressive episode. I had my new-and-improved formula for academic success but couldn't execute; a malaise and a pervasive darkness sank in around everything I tried to do. It strained friendships, frightened my family, and jeopardized my graduation. Many factors can lead to depression, and many of them are out of one's control. My error was not asking for help when I needed it most. My recovery was enabled by supportive healthcare practitioners, professors, mentors, friends, and family that all helped me find the road forward. Though incredibly difficult at the time, these experiences now help me better empathize with my students as they navigate tumultuous times in their lives. I amenormously grateful to be able to pay forward the mentorship that I received and help my students recognize their value inside (and more importantly) outside of the classroom.

"Do you need any help?" That's a question I've tried to ask others since college. As a technician working at the University of Colorado, I helped run a confocal core facility. My job involved teaching users about the different types of confocal microscopy, the care of use of the instruments, and helping them design an imaging experiment. This was a unique position because it allowed me to participate in a wide variety of research projects throughout the institution, and I thoroughly enjoyed interacting with new users and teaching them about microscopy. Being part of this vibrant community is also what motivated me to pursue my PhD. By my mid-twenties, I had a renewed self-awareness, new tools to manage my mental health, and had separated my self-worth from classroom performance. I had landed a spot in a top PhD program, in a lab with a collegial, friendly atmosphere and a wonderfully supportive mentor doing research that I truly enjoyed. As I became a senior member of the lab, I was able to supervise the projects of several rotation students and two summer undergraduate students. Again, I found it extremely gratifying to be able to help them understand their projects, gain technical acumen, and mature as researchers. After graduating, I still had quite a bit of uncertainty about my next steps. I loved teaching but I wasn't sure about remaining in academia. "Was I good enough?" "Do I have something to offer?" Here again, I will stressthe importance of finding mentors that are supportive, and will act as advocates for you. I was reminded that I had received a world-class education, my diverse experiences on multiple projects made me a very well rounded scientist capable of utilizing multiple techniques across different areas of neuroscience, and I myself was becoming a practiced teacher and advisor having supervised students and designed an undergraduate neuroscience course. All these experiences helped me become a better educator and be competitive for teaching-focused faculty positions. During my job search, (just 1.5 years into my post-doc) I was extended two tenure-track offers. Ultimately, everyone's scientific and professional journey is different, and you don't always know when things will lock into place. Protect your health, find mentorship, and help those around you. And just for the record, "You DO belong here."

Woo-Young Ahn (Jul 7, 2021)

Official story
Woo-Young (Young) Ahn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Seoul National University (September 2019 - Present; Assistant Professor from September 2017 to August 2019). He was previously an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and an affiliated faculty at Translational Data Analytics at The Ohio State University (August 2015 - August 2017). He earned his B.S. in materials science & engineering in 2002 from Seoul National University and then went to Harvard University as a doctoral candidate for applied physics and received his S.M. in applied physics in 2003. Due to his interests in the human mind, he decided to change his major to clinical psychology so that he could study the human mind from multiple perspectives. He continued on to receive his M.A. in clinical psychology from Seoul National University in 2006, and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Indiana University, Bloomington in August 2012 co-advised by Jerome Busemeyer and Brian O'Donnell. He completed his (APA accredited) clinical psychology internship at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in June 2012. He worked then as a postdoc with Read Montague and Peter Dayan for two years at Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute (VTCRI) and for a year at Virginia Commonwealth University Institute for Drug and Alcohol Studies.

Unofficial story
Woo-Young grew up in Seoul, Korea, "naively" thinking he would become a scientist after getting his PhD in engineering. He had no serious interest in the human mind until he joined the army after finishing his junior year at Seoul National University (SNU) to fulfill his mandatory military service. Experience in the military often made him wonder why we think and behave in a certain way, especially under stress or conflict of interest. He was released from the army after 26 months of military service and became seriously interested in religion and read many books on the topic. At the same time, he took GRE and TOEFL to apply for PhD programs in engineering in the US. He was not sure if doing a PhD in engineering was a right choice, but still applied for PhD programs and received admissions from his top choices and things went very smoothly. He went to Harvard to do his PhD in applied physics but it was hard to focus on his study during his PhD. He realized that he wasn't really thinking about his major (e.g., semiconductors, nano materials) but his interests are more on the human mind and related topics. After meeting several people in the Boston area and reading books in psychology, he thought maybe clinical psychology was the field he was looking for. However, he took no course in psychology in college and had no relevant background, so switching to psychology right away from applied physics was impossible. So, after completing coursework for a year in applied physics, he decided to take a leave of absence and go back to Korea to pursue a master in psychology in Korea although his parents were not supportive of his decision. Thankfully, he got accepted into a master's program in psychology at SNU because his advisor somehow thought he might have some potential in psychology (he still thanks his master advisor a lot for the decision). Psychology was very different from engineering and he struggled but could finish his master's degree and applied for PhD programs in the US again, but this time in clinical psychology. It was extremely difficult for him to get into a PhD program in clinical psychology - he had just one phone interview (Indiana University (IU), Bloomington) and initially got rejection letters from every school. Somehow "miraculously", the IU Psychology program revoked the rejection letter and gave him an admission. Graduate life at IU was overall really great but getting training in clinical psychology as a non-native speaker in English was very challenging. Still, he was very fortunate to have met great mentors and clients/patients who helped him grow up as a clinical psychologist. After his PhD, he did two postdocs (transition to the second postdoc was rough) and went to a job market. Getting a first tenure-track faculty position was extremely hard but luckily The Ohio State University (OSU) gave him a dream job. He thought he would be at OSU for many years but things didn't go as planned and he moved to SNU in Seoul, Korea in 2017 with his family. Reflecting his life. he thinks life is full of so much uncertainty, and his carefully laid plans almost always go awry. He changed his career to have a (more) meaningful life but is still searching for his meaning.

Megan Carey (May 5, 2021)

Official story
Megan R. Carey is a Group Leader in the Neuroscience Program at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal. She received her PhD in 2005 from the University of California, San Francisco, where her thesis was awarded UCSF's Krevans Distinguished Dissertation Award. After a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Carey started her independent laboratory at the Champalimaud. Her lab combines quantitative behavioral analysis, genetics, and physiology to understand how the brain controls learned and coordinated movements. Megan has chaired a number of scientific conferences, including Cosyne and the Cerebellum Gordon Conference, and she serves on the Board of the Society for the Neural Control of Movement and the Board of Reviewing Editors for the journal eLife. She is a member (and former Chair) of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence and the Chair-Elect of the ALBA Network for Equity and Diversity in Brain Sciences.

Unofficial story
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Megan first discovered neuroscience when reading her college coursebook from cover to cover. All the most interesting-sounding courses had the mysterious letters NS&B in front of them, which turned out to mean Neuroscience (and Behavior), a thing she had no idea even existed. She showed up on campus at Wesleyan University unsure whether she'd major in that or physics, her favorite subject in high school. But intro Biology (which she hated in high school, but was a required prerequisite for a Neuroscience major) and intro Physics were scheduled in the same time slot, so she had to choose on the first day. She chose neuroscience and never looked back - to the side, yes, but never back. She walked into the lab of her faculty advisor David Bodznick one day while he was recording from the brain of a skate, heard the magical pop-pop of actual neurons for the first time, and was hooked. He offered her a research position and she spent two blissful summers in his lab at the MBL in Woods Hole, poking skate brains, eating lunch on the dock, and sitting in on fascinating lectures. It still seemed impossible that she could be a real scientist when she grew up, but he told her that he thought she could, so she applied to grad school and got in. She got kind of burned out writing her Master's thesis, though, so on a whim she deferred for a year to volunteer at a guest house in Mexico City, serving breakfast and working in reception and developing a taste for living abroad. Then she moved to San Francisco and spent the next 6.5 years at UCSF questioning her life's choices while she struggled with the slow pace of monkey research and the active obstruction of animal rights activists. She spent more of this time than she expected at City Hall, first testifying against a proposed city-wide shutdown of primate labs, and later, testifying to her illegal arrest by SFPD while protesting the 2003 Iraq war. She eventually decided that she needed to give neuroscience one more chance before she left (to do what though?), and enrolled in the summer Neurobiology course at the MBL, which reinvigorated her love for science and encouraged her to jump fields for her postdoc. After marrying one of her grad school classmates, they moved to Boston for postdocs and were blissfully happy for a year or so, before she had her first child and they started scrambling for everything - enough hours in the day, enough money for childcare, enough faculty positions for both of them. They went on the job market in Sept 2008, just days before the markets crashed and searches were cancelled, but somehow, they both managed to get great offers. Hers was in NYC and his was in Vienna though, and trying to solve that really sucked for a while, until they heard about this new institute that was being built in Lisbon, Portugal. It seemed impossible that they would actually move there, but something magical happened on those recruitment visits and the next thing they knew, they were moving across the ocean with a toddler and a baby, for jobs at a place called the Center for the Unknown. She (mostly) loves her job as a PI, and is surprised and pleased that she has found a career that satisfies her love of science, her international yearnings, and even her inner activist.

Yael Niv (Apr 19th, 2021)

Official story
Yael Niv received her MA in Psychobiology from Tel Aviv University and her PhD in Computational Neuroscience from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, having conducted a major part of her thesis research at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in UCL. She is currently a professor at Princeton University, at the Psychology Department and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Her lab studies the neural and computational processes underlying reinforcement learning and decision making, with a particular focus on how the cognitive processes of attention, memory and learning interact in constructing task representations that allow efficient learning and decision making. She is co-founder and co-director of the Rutgers-Princeton Center for Computational Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, where she is applying ideas from reinforcement learning to questions pertaining to psychiatric disorders within the new field of computational psychiatry.

Unofficial story
Yael grew up in Israel, thinking she would work in a Kibbutz and be a farmer. Two weeks volunteering in a Kibbutz in high school convinced her otherwise. She nixed her second career aspiration, to be a teacher, because she was worried about being surrounded by burnt out colleagues. Instead, after her mandatory military service in which she learned software programming -- and decided she hated it and would never do it again -- she married both her passions for nature and teaching and became a guide in the Society for Preservation of Nature. That paid pennies, so she also applied for part time jobs in software programming, thinking she would do that only for 6 months, to save up some money. Amazingly, she discovered that with the right colleagues, even programming can be fun. When she found out that in university she has to commit to one discipline from the start, she balked. Luckily she was accepted (after being rejected the previous year) to an interdisciplinary program at Tel Aviv University, that allowed her to create a US-college-like experience, and to study computational neuroscience before there were any BA programs even remotely related to the brain. Through this direct-to-MA program, she joined a lab in computer science (housed in the medical school) and had a second advisor in psychobiology. Her MA was in the latter, not the former, because psychology demanded fewer mandatory courses. Her MA paper was reviewed in most journals in the field, and rejected from all. In the end it was published in Adaptive Behavior, at a point where she could no longer look at it. Having lived with her high-school sweetheart for years at this point, they decided to get married, but then Yael joined a neuromorphic engineering summer course (because her lab mates told her it was super fun, and involved a lot of volleyball, which she did not, and still does not, play). From the transatlantic distance she suddenly realized her partner was not supportive of her career, so she ditched him a month before the wedding. Unrelated (really!), but in the same course, she met the person who would later become her soulmate. Planning to do her PhD in Zurich where he was a researcher, she finally quit her temporary 6-month-max programming job after 7 years. She quite liked that job, and was leading a team of 10 people (kinda like a lab). The plan was to get the PhD and then return there and be promoted. Tragically, her partner died unexpectedly 2 years and a month after they met. She almost died too, as a result. But she survived, and diverted her PhD plans to London, which had been his favorite city. She was officially a student at the Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computational at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, though in practice spent her time between the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in London, working with Peter Dayan, and Tel Aviv University, working with Daphna Joel. In London, she met Nathaniel Daw, who was her clandestine boyfriend (since they were in the same lab). Their first paper together led to so many heated arguments, that they decided to avoid collaborating in the future. At Gatsby, Yael also learned for the first time that people doing a PhD consider staying in academia as faculty. Given that Nathaniel applied for faculty positions in USA, she applied for postdocs there too, joining Jonathan Cohen's lab at Princeton. Shortly thereafter, she realized her mistake: she loved Princeton, but would not be able to be faculty there as they do not hire their own postdocs. Luckily (amazingly luckily, really), a faculty position opened a couple of months after she arrived, and she was encouraged to apply as a newbie, and as a long shot. She got the job. It was actually the position that Nathaniel had turned down a year prior, when he chose NYU. And it was contingent on submitting her thesis, which she had not yet finished writing. As junior faculty, by the time she was told to make sure to not create any enemies before tenure, it was too late. Her Israeli outspokenness and strong sense of justice had led her to call out gender bias and make some enemies. Her activism and community organizing also led her to found (with others) the website biaswatchneuro, and the faculty-support mailing list NeuroTeam. Years later, she finds herself a full professor, no longer commuting from NYC as Nathaniel was finally lured to Princeton as a spousal hire, running a lab where she is fortunate to be working with amazing students and postdocs, and raising two boys, at least one of whom shares her oversized sense of empathy (reminding her that gender has nothing to do with personality). In her "other job", spurred by the 2016 election, she co-founded and runs the Princeton Progressive Action Group and is president of the Good Government Coalition of New Jersey. She can talk about these for hours, so don't get her started. It turns out that she is a teacher after all, and yes, some of her colleagues are burnt out, but all in all this is probably the best way to teach in a constantly invigorated environment. She misses home -- her friends, family, and the scenery and hikes of her home country -- terribly.

Wei Ji Ma (Mar 11th, 2021) - GUIS Maastricht University

Official story
Weiji received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He went on to do postdocs in computational neuroscience with Christof Koch at Caltech and with Alex Pouget at the University of Rochester. He became Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in 2008 and moved to New York University in 2013, where he is now Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology. His research focuses on perceptual and cognitive decision-making under uncertainty, with a recent focus on complex planning.

Unofficial story
Weiji was born in a very small town in the far northeast of The Netherlands, and grew up in the progressive but still remote town of Groningen. He is a third-generation Dutch whose single mom vacillated between Chinese tiger parenting and Dutch irreverence. Weiji had a bizarre childhood, graduating from high school at age 14 and from college at 17, along the way picking up media appearances, deficits in social skills, and an inflated self-image. His confidence came crashing down in his PhD, which was initially misguided (bad advisor) and eventually just too hard (string theory). He was leaning heavily on a fellow grad student and his PhD never felt like his own. Weiji was also easily distracted, spending more time being active in organizations and playing online chess than doing research. Making it to faculty seemed like a distant dream. He considered alternative careers, including business consulting, but decided to give science one more chance. Starting as a postdoc offered new opportunities for delusions of grandeur: he thought he would solve consciousness using statistical physics. Back on Earth, Weiji published only one book chapter with Christof Koch, and in 2004, Christof had no choice but to kick him out of his lab. Only in his second postdoc, under Alex Pouget's whip, did he start to get his act together, but this was also a time when, working besides a highly skilled fellow postdoc, impostor complex hit hard. Weiji got his faculty job thanks to just enough people seeing promise in the absence of accomplishments. His procrastination is still alive and kicking to this day, but since his students and postdocs now do the actual work, he can get away with it.

Sindy Joyce (Feb 10th, 2021)

Official story
Doctor Sindy Joyce is a Human Rights Defender (HRD) and member of President Michael D Higgins Council of State. She was named as one of the '50 brilliant Irish women who inspired us in 2018' by the Daily Edge. In 2014, she won the Traveller Pride Award for Education. She is the first person from the Mincéir (Irish Traveller) nomadic ethnic minority in Ireland to graduate with a PhD and to be appointed to the Council of State. Her research interests include both direct and indirect forms of racism, ethnicity/identity, social/political constructions of Mincéirí and the production of space related inequalities, her PhD title was Mincéirs Siúladh: An ethnographic study of young Travellers' experiences of racism in an Irish city. Sindy was successful in winning the prestigious Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship Scheme with a top score.

Ashley Juavinett (Feb 2nd, 2021) - GUIS Oxford University

Official story
Ashley received her B.S. degree in Neuroscience from Lafayette College in 2011. With just enough research experience under her belt, she went on to pursue a Ph.D. in neuroscience at UC San Diego with Ed Callaway. During her PhD, Ashley used various imaging techniques to understand different cell types and circuits in the mouse visual cortex. In 2016, Ashley moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to work with Anne Churchland on innate behaviors in freely moving mice. She became an Assistant Teaching Professor in Neurobiology at UC San Diego in 2018, where she teaches, writes, and co-directs the BS/MS and STARTneuro programs. In 2020, she published her first book, So You Want to be a Neuroscientist?, meant to be a guide for aspiring scientists who are curious about our field.

Unofficial story
Ashley often says she's from Philadelphia but she is really from South Jersey. She is the first doctorate holder and first scientist in her family - she relied on input from guidance counselors and college professors to figure out that science was a reasonable path forward. After reading "Mind Wide Open," by Steven Johnson, Ashley started to think that neuroscience was a fascinating field, and applied to colleges with at least some semblance of a neuroscience program. Her father also encouraged her to pursue engineering - she looked for schools that had both. She ended up at Lafayette College, a school largely attended by students from families with much, much higher household incomes than her own (she was on a full scholarship), which was a bit isolating.

Upon graduating college, Ashley applied to the Peace Corps and to multiple neuroscience PhD programs as well as an PhD/MPP (Masters in Public Policy) program. She also very briefly and not-so-seriously considered trying to make it as a singer-songwriter. Although teaching science in South Africa was tempting, she decided she'd channel the desire to give back into something else. The aforementioned guidance counselor advised her that sometimes when we gain power in systems we can ultimately initiate change in the larger infrastructure - the kind of change that has lasting impact. The PhD/MPP program was also tempting, but Ashley decided to go against her liberal arts gut and pursue the pure PhD.

Ashley was barely ready for graduate school. Her liberal arts college had one narrow slice of neuroscience, and her research experience largely consisted of summer research programs - experiences that wouldn't have been attainable if they didn't pay stipends and cover housing. By some miracle, she was accepted to UC San Diego's neuroscience program. During those years, she learned how satisfying systems neuroscience could be, how to play in a band, as well as how to navigate being queer with her Catholic upbringing.

Still drawn to neuroscience and the prospect of being a professor, Ashley pursued a postdoc. However, the reality of her long distance relationship set in. Ashley started considering many different options for next steps until a job listing prompted her jaw to hit her desk: a teaching-focused position back in San Diego. This job, combined with lots of science writing on the side, opened up a host of opportunities for her to give back to the neuroscience community in ways that continue to energize her. Now, her overarching goal is to create spaces for all kinds of students, from South Jersey and beyond.

Deepna Devkar (Jan 7th, 2021)

Official story
Deepna Devkar is Vice President of Data Science & Engineering and heads up the Data Intelligence team at CNN. She works to understand the CNN audience across devices and build recommendation systems that increase user engagement across all CNN brands.

During her career in data science, she has primarily worked in the media industry, both as a hands-on IC (individual contributor) and as a manager responsible for building and leading cross-functional teams.Prior to joining CNN, Devkar started as Vice President of Data Science Products for WarnerMedia, where she led a team of data scientists, engineers and product managers to build scalable data science products across WarnerMedia's brands. Shealso held positions at Viacom and Dotdash (formerly About.com) where she attainedexpertise in the linear TV space and digital media and publishing landscape, respectively. Before her transition into data science, she spent over a decade in scientific research, studying the psychological and neural underpinnings of human behavior.

Recently, she was recognized for her contribution as Folio's Top Women in Media, Corporate Champion in 2018. Devkar has enjoyed working on projects ranging across audience segmentation, content recommendation and personalization, search engine and revenue optimization. She is most passionate about evangelizingdata science and regularly speaks at meetings and conferences. She also regularly participates in events supporting women in tech, management and leadership, and is a founding member of Chief.

Devkar received her Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from the University of Texas, and also holds a master's and bachelor's degree in psychology. She moved to New York to pursue a post-doctoral fellowship at New York University. She ended up leaving academia but has made New York her new home.

Unofficial story
Deepna grew up in a small town in West India exhibiting all characteristics of an only child, fitting all stereotypes of an Indian kid: obedient daughter, star student, teacher's pet, addicted bookworm, social conformist, and a spelling bee fan with aspirations of becoming a medical doctor. When she was 13, she moved to Texas with her parents, who quickly started pursuing the American dream, while she struggled through a major culture shock. Over the next decade, she discovered thathuman behavior was more interesting (and less nauseating) to study than the human body. After three degrees dedicated towards research in Psychology/Neuroscience (B.S., M.S., & Ph.D.), she graduated with many accolades, research awards and conference talks, and only 1 first-author paper, 'In Submission', to show for. Several excuses ensued; one of which was terrible choicesof disillusioned advisors. Weiji Ma adopted her in times of much desperation and became a mentor, also advising her to finally cut the umbilical cord from Texas and move to NYC for a postdoc fellowship at NYU (his most convincing argument: "All cool people eventually move to the Northeast."). The security was short-lived. As she witnessed her academic heroes scrambling around for grants, terrifying reality checks began to creep in. The big city had also planted bigger dreams. Some serious introspection, much support from her predecessors, and a lot of luck led her to data science - a field she didn't even know existed a year before she plunged for it.

Five years in, she is Vice President at CNN, leading the Data Intelligence team of about 30 machine learning data scientists and engineers. There are many skills thatshe had to learn on the job (and continues to), including people management, whichis actually the most rewarding aspect of her career. She still gets to work on a variety of fun, challenging problems with smart people and enjoys the ability to drive business strategy to make tangible impact on a quick time scale. During her short tenure in industry, she has learned many important life lessons, one of which has been to accept but ignore her impostor syndrome. Being opportunistic has become her life mantra, as it has been the common thread that connects her dots looking backwards.

Unlike some of her ex-academic colleagues, she does not regret her academic life. When she retires from the "real world", she actually hopes to return to academia to teach whatever she has learned and might be of value. For now, she welcomes all opportunities to convince a fellow despondent academic that there is a world out there, where 95% of us have gone to, found happiness and decent success, even though academia still calls it the "alternative-career" world.

Deepna recently became a first-time mom to a baby boy born at the height of the pandemic in New York City. She truly believes that motherhood gives exceptional superpowers that she wouldn't trade for anything.

Michael Hopkins (Oct 21st, 2020)

Official story
Michael Hopkins is a 3rd year graduate student in the lab of Seth Margolis at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where he is an NSF GRFP and HHMI Gilliam fellowship awardee. His thesis research focuses on the molecular mechanisms underlying the formation and function of a novel neuronal membrane proteasome (NMP) complex and its role in synaptic transmission. Prior to starting graduate school Michael received his B.S. in pharmaceutical science from North Carolina Central University. Michael is also the founder of Black Scientists Matter a nonprofit organization working to improve Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for people of African descent in STEM. In the future Michael hopes to combine his passion for scientific research, education, and policy in an academic science career.

Unofficial story
Michael Hopkins is the youngest of 4 children born to Kim and Eric Hopkins of Raleigh, North Carolina. Throughout his childhood Michael balanced a love for school with a love for athletics. Although being Black, society made it clear which he was expected to fail in and which he was expected to succeed in. Michael's aptitude for science began in high school chemistry class where he was exposed to the intellectual rigor of science and discovered a fascination with the scientific unknowns of our universe. After his high school athletic career dwindled Michael chose to focus on his intellectual pursuits at North Carolina Central University, an HBCU (historically black college or university) where he studied pharmaceutical science. At NCCU it was through a concerted effort from his professors/mentors, department, and university that he was exposed to careers in scientific research. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion sound like "buzzwords" in 2020 but it was because of programs like the Partners cancer research program at UNC Chapel Hill, the EXROP program sponsored by HHMI, the Louise Stokes Alliance for Minority participation (LS-AMP), and the Leadership Alliance at Harvard, which provided an opportunity for an otherwise unspectacular Black boy from North Carolina to conduct scientific research all over the United States, develop a lifelong passion for learning, and find a community to support him in his endeavors. Building upon on these experiences and paying it forward, in 2017 Michael founded Black Scientists Matter Inc., a nonprofit organization working to improve diversity in STEM. It is only through quality mentorship, opportunity, and support that Michael is now pursuing his Ph.D. today (I wonder how many more Black scientists there could be if this model were applied universally).

Unfortunately, Michael's academic journey doesn't end in a happily ever after (yet?). After graduating from NCCU, Michael applied to 7 graduate schools for his Ph.D. (including NYU) and was rejected from all of them except 1. Luckily the BCMB (Biochemistry, Cellular, Molecular Biology) program at Johns Hopkins saw something that they believed in. Michael's grad school career got off to a rocky start when he failed a class and had to complete 4 lab rotations after being rejected from 2/3 of the original labs he rotated in. However, it was in the 4th rotation that Michael met Seth Margolis an outstanding mentor and person, one who supported him. Now beginning his third year of graduate school, Michael has matriculated to Ph.D. candidacy and been awarded two prestigious grants to fund his graduate research and another one to further his non-profit venture Black Scientists Matter. Although Michael battles imposter syndrome every day and still feels like he has no idea what he is doing, he would like to emphasize 3 lessons he has learned 1) you don't need external validation to tell you that you belong, 2) failure is always a learning experience, and 3) everyone deserves an opportunity.

Daniel Colón-Ramos (Aug 21st, 2020)

Official story
Daniel Colón-Ramos was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He completed his B.A. at Harvard University. During his undergraduate career, he pursued research projects, such as studying the use of medicinal plants among indigenous Central American communities with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). He then worked as a research assistant, with the support of an NIH Diversity Supplement, in Dr. Mariano García-Blanco's laboratory at Duke University. There, he studied how the architecture of the nucleus of the algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii changes to affect cytoplasmic events, such as transcript localization. He stayed at Duke to pursue his PhD in the laboratory of cell biologist Sally Kornbluth. For his doctoral work, Colón-Ramos studied the molecular mechanisms underlying programmed cell death, or apoptosis, and identified a viral family of proteins that induce apoptosis, which are similar to the so-called "Reaper" proteins first identified in fruit flies. He also found that these proteins operate by regulating protein translation, directly binding to the ribosomes-which are the cellular machinery that translate RNA messages into protein products-to alter their assembly. He completed his dissertation "The reaper tales: molecular mechanism of inhibition of translation and induction of apoptosis by a novel family of reaper-like proteins" in 2003. Following his PhD, Colón-Ramos moved to California to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscientist Kang Shen's laboratory as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation fellow, with the additional support of a National Institutes of Health "Pathways to Independence" award. There, he shifted his research focus to studying the developmental neurobiology of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. To understand how synapses are established, he established a system to track synapses over the worms development using in vivo cellular markers. Using this system, he found that glial cells provide a roadmap for these connections to be made through the signaling molecule netrin. In 2008, he joined the faculty at the Yale School of Medicine as an assistant professor. In 2013, he was promoted to associate professor, and in 2019 to the McConnell Duberg Professor of Neuroscience and Cell Biology. The Colón-Ramos lab is interested in how synapses are precisely assembled to build the neuronal architecture that underlies behavior. To address this, they developed tools in the thermotaxis circuit of C. elegans. Their system enables unbiased genetic screens to identify novel pathways that instruct synaptogenesis in vivo, and single-cell manipulation of these pathways to understand how they influence behavior. As mechanisms underlying synapse structure and function are conserved, the research program seeks to enhance our understanding of synaptic cell biology in higher organisms, which may be important for disease. His work has been recognized by the 2018 NIH Pioneer Award, the 2018 Landis Award for Outstanding Mentorship from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, HHMI Faculty Scholar Award, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Early Career Award, and the Sloan Research Fellowship.

Unofficial story
Daniel Colón-Ramos was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He was a nerdy kid that annoyed teachers with many questions, and by the time he graduate from elementary school, he was nicknamed "the student with a thousand unanswered questions". His parents, which were the first in their respective families to go to college, emphasized education. Daniel was admitted to Harvard University and wondered, almost every day for four years of undergrad, who made the mistake of admitting him. He was fired from his first lab job. He did not fit in and explored his identity as a scientist and his interests in social justice by studying the use of medicinal plants among indigenous Central American communities, in part to get away from the labs at Harvard. He worked alone and almost failed his honors thesis. He had a pretty mediocre college career. He followed his girlfriend (now wife) to Duke University and worked as a postbac, with Puerto Rican scientists Dr. Mariano García-Blanco. He was put in a marginal project, which turned into a wonderful research opportunity and his first paper. He then stayed at Duke to pursue his PhD in the laboratory of cell biologist Sally Kornbluth, were he studied the molecular mechanisms underlying programmed cell death. He studied for his qualifying exam in federal prison after protesting the military bombings in Vieques, Puerto Rico. He was frequently remined in graduate school that he was accepted because he was a minority. He dedicated his thesis dissertation "To those who could have done a better job than I, but never received the opportunities may they (one day) receive the opportunities to share their knowledge and their skills in a society w/o prejudices". He moved to California, in a hurry, following his wife who matched at UCSF, and interviewed with Kang Shen in a car, because Kang did not have a lab at the time (he was a postdoc with Cori Bargmann and had not yet started his position at Stanford). He applied to several postdoc fellowships, was rejected from most, but was awarded the Damon Runyon and later, was in the inaugural class of the K-99/R-00 grantees. He spent the first six months of his postdoc in failed cloning attempts, followed by the death of a close friend, it was not until late in the first year he managed to gather interpretable data for his project, and at that, in a side project which was not part of his main research program goals. In 2008, he joined the faculty at the Yale School of Medicine as an assistant professor. In the first four years he applied to over fifty grants before he was awarded his first three grants. His first R-01 he got by the skin of his teeth. His first paper was rejected five times and took a year and a half of revisions. During that time he had triplets, five years later, another baby, all girls. His wife is an academic scientist. He was recently named the McConnell Duberg Professor of Neuroscience and Cell Biology at Yale University, and submitted this biography late because he has been revising a manuscript that has been in the review process for 17 months.

Andre Marques-Smith (Jul 31st, 2020) - GUIS Oxford University

Official story
Andre Marques-Smith was born in Portugal, to a mixed Portuguese-Scottish background and parents who are academics in Mathematics and Chemistry. From his early childhood he showed a fascination with all things scientific, especially paleontology and astronomy. In his teenage years he discovered Biology and Psychology, which led to him pursuing an undergraduate in Psychology at Universidade do Minho and later a PhD programme in Neuroscience at Oxford University. Working with Zoltan Molnar and Simon Butt, he mapped out the development of early thalamocortical and intracortical excitatory-inhibitory circuits. In a postdoc with Beatriz Rico at King's College London, he added a molecular-genetic perspective to this research, focusing on the impact of different genes on the development of inhibitory cortical circuits. As his interests developed into Systems Neuroscience, he took up a second postdoctoral position with Adam Kampff, at the Sainsbury-Wellcome Centre, where he recorded from the same neuron in vivo using Neuropixels probes and patch-clamp, in order to gather an open ground-truth dataset to be used for development and benchmarking of spike-sorting algorithms. After learning and honing new skills for tackling mature brain structure and function, Andre secured a Henry-Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue the regulation of cortico-cortical communication by thalamic inhibitory circuits in the labs of Sonja Hofer, Mike Halassa and Adam Kampff. Working on the visual system, Andre became exposed to work in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, which led to him self-training in parallel on these topics. An opportunity arose to apply his neuroscience and AI skills to Brain-Computer Interfaces at the deep tech startup CoMind Technologies, where Andre now works as a Neuroscientist.

Unofficial story
Andre was a nerdy and shy kid growing up who liked to sit down eating crackers and reading books about dinosaurs, planets and the adventures of Donald Duck and the Three Ducklings. Noticing his early nerdiness and shyness, his parents (rightfully) warned him off academia through dinner time conversations about teaching and admin loads and departmental politics. It worked temporarily. Andre outgrew his dinosaurs, planets, and Donald Duck phase, replacing it with a goth phase comprising Byron, Shelley, Cradle of Filth and Norwegian Black Metal. As a teenager he had no interest whatsoever in Science and dreamt of exploring the darkest depths of the human psyche through Art. In the course of his pitiful pursuits in the fine arts (lol), Andre found out he was actually a good writer and decided to become a novelist or a poet. He read and wrote copiously to hone his skills until his final year of high school, when he learnt about Darwin and the theory of evolution. Darwin's beautiful idea was a spark that ignited a wildfire in the woods of Andre's young mind and the world of biology opened up like a forest clearing to him. However, Andre struggled to decide on what to study for university. After failed pursuits in Biology and Anthropology, Andre settled on a Psychology undergraduate at Universidade do Minho. He was exposed to neuroscience, cognitive science, animal behaviour, learning and perception through mentors Armando Machado and Oscar Goncalves and came to realise "Neuroscience" was the name of the thing he really wanted to learn about, so he decided to try for a PhD. He was accepted into a programme in Oxford, during the course of which the brilliant lectures of Jeremy Taylor motivated him to do his project on developmental neuroscience and early circuit formation with Zoltan Molnar and Ole Paulsen. Andre struggled a lot with the project and Ole's move to Cambridge, which he had been aware of when he decided to do the project but had (stupidly) underestimated the impact of. Two thirds of the PhD were all about impostor syndrome, struggles with techniques and lack of results positive or negative. Andre worked tirelessly but he grew withdrawn, depressed and sullen. He considered quitting many times. His fortunes would change with the arrival of Simon Butt, who would become his new electrophysiology advisor. Andre and Simon struck a once-in-a-lifetime partnership, and a backup project mapping cortical inputs to subplate neurons started to yield results. This led to another project on a mysterious L5b interneuron population and to involvement in a project in Simon's lab mapping early interneuron-pyramidal connectivity. A combination of lucky stroke, great mentorship and hardcore motivation and work ethic led to Andre finishing his PhD with 3 manuscript submissions and a newfound enthusiasm. He went on to do a postdoc with Beatriz Rico at King's College. Andre's ego was pumped at this point and he wanted to show the world of neuroscience what he could do. This proved to make for a less than ideal fit to the team projects he would be involved in at the Rico lab. Andre enjoyed working on these projects and how much he learnt from them, publishing several papers with Beatriz, but ultimately his interests were shifting to Systems Neuroscience. He was eager to explore some ideas he had on high-order thalamocortical structures which were influenced by the work of his hero Ray Guillery (RIP). This brought him to the lab of Adam Kampff at SWC, where he would take on an open science project recording from the same neuron with Neuropixels probes and patch-clamp, after which he would be completely free to pursue his questions. The project went well and through Adam's great mentorship, Andre learnt about the value of Open Science and team projects (which he had previously underappreciated erroneously). All throughout, Andre had been studying and writing his project on high-order thalamocortical networks and decided to submit it for a Henry-Wellcome fellowship. He had applied twice before for this fellowship and hadn't even gotten past the prelim stage because he didn't have papers and that's what they actually care about. Sonja Hofer, who was interested in similar questions, joined SWC in the meantime. Andre began discussing the project with her, and Sonja played a key role in honing Andre's ideas. He got the fellowship and started to work on the project. After a very productive 6-months, he took a summer vacation and basically collapsed, burnt out by the cumulative pressures and problems of Academia. He had struggled with many of these issues in the past, at every stage of his career, but it was as if they were all catching up now at the same time. He took stock of the privileged situation he was in: a prestigious fellowship, wonderful colleagues and state-of-the-art conditions. This was as good as it could get, yet somehow he didn't feel happy. He imagined the best-case scenario for the 3 years ahead: publishing multiple big papers from the fellowship and securing a group leader position at one of the top 5 UK universities. This had been his goal for the past 12 years yet now, when it appeared before him, it no longer made him excited. Andre felt the individualism of the academic career track led to researchers taking on projects of very limited scope and utterly lacking in any measurable societal impact. What was the point of it all? Ironically given his earlier thinking, he now felt working as part of a horizontal team of talented people would allow him to tackle bigger ideas and deliver consequential results which would actually help the lives of other people. He began studying AI, Machine Learning and Deep Neural Networks in order to start a new career. Similar to Darwin's great idea, this field of study inspired Andre hugely and he became eager to learn more. He took a sabbatical to concentrate on these studies and find career opportunities and began thinking of applying his new learnings to the field of BCI. At this point he met a brilliant young CEO and founder, who offered him the opportunity to work on building a non-invasive BCI, bridging his interests in neuroscience and AI. Andre accepted it, started a new chapter, kissed Academia goodbye and never looked back. He's a very happy man now.

Jane Willenbring (Jun 26, 2020)

Official story
Jane Willenbring is an Associate Professor in the Geosciences Research Division at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. She joined Scripps in summer of 2016. Jane is the Director of the Scripps Cosmogenic Isotope Laboratory (SCI-Lab). Jane is a geologist who solves problems related to the Earth's surface. Her research is to understand the evolution of the Earth's surface - especially how landscapes are affected by tectonics, climate change, and life. She and her research group use geochemical techniques, high-resolution topographic data, field observations, and, when possible, couple these data to landscape evolution numerical models and ice sheet models. The geochemical tools she uses and develops often include cosmogenic nuclide systems, which provide powerful, novel methods to constrain rates of erosion and mineral weathering. Jane has also started to organize citizen science campaigns and apply basic science principles to problems of human health with an ultimate broader impact goal of cleaning up urban areas and environments impacted by agriculture. She received her B.Sc. with honors from the North Dakota State University where she was a McNair Scholar, a Master's degree from Boston University, and her Ph.D. in Earth sciences from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada, where she became an Izaak Walton Killam Laureate. She was a Synthesis Postdoctoral Fellow through the National Center for Earth-Surface Dynamics at the famous Saint Anthony Falls Lab at the University of Minnesota, and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and then subsequently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Helmholtz GFZ Potsdam, Germany. Jane was previously a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Blaustein visiting professor at Stanford University. In August of 2020, she will move to Stanford University and will be an Associate Professor and Gabilan Fellow. She is an NSF Career Grant awardee and a Fellow of the Geological Society of America.

Unofficial story
I grew up extremely poor in rural North Dakota. A lot of children (and adults!) would probably find a lack of TV oppressive and isolating, but I found things I loved to do outside, away from my house. I explored the rolling prairie and came up with experiments to do. I didn't know a lot about science then and so I would use my imagination to make up stories about the landscape and the things that lived on it and I would make rivers in the mud with a garden hose. As a highschool student, I put all my energy into making myself different. I milked my neighbor's goats in the morning before school to pay for afterschool activities - like oboe lessons, Science Club and Tae Kwon Do. I applied to North Dakota State University two months before school started. I started learning about climate change through interactions with a paleontologist who needed a work study student and I discovered Antarctic geology and then applied to the McNair program. I learned that I loved science and the math classes my mentor urged me to take.
I was admitted to a Master's program at Boston University to get field experience in Antarctica to study the history of the Antarctic ice sheets and spent the austral summers of 1999-2000 and 2000-2001 in the Dry Valleys. I loved Antarctica and the chronology aspects of the work, but wanted to get as far as possible from working with my advisor. The farthest possible place was the Arctic. I took a Ph.D. fellowship from Dalhousie University, Canada - perhaps foolishly turning down a graduate fellowship position at UC Berkeley, because I thought my advisor was nice - and he was! My Ph.D. seemed long and difficult. I thought about quitting many times, but I'm glad I didn't quit. I married my college sweetheart and took his last name. My husband was playing in a rock band in Minneapolis and so I applied for a postdoctoral position at the National Center for Earth-Surface Dynamics at the University of Minnesota working with the famous Gary Parker and another professor who didn't get tenure and left. Gary Parker left the University of Minnesota right before I arrived and my other mentor turned out to be incapacitated due to severe depression for the entirety of that postdoc. My National Center for Earth-Surface Dynamics postdoc was life-changing though and I discovered that the amazing group of people were very much in need of new geochemical tools to help answer new questions and old questions in new ways. My husband and I got a divorce and I changed my name back to my maiden name and wanted to get as far as possible from Minnesota.
I applied for and received an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship that took me to Germany to first learn German for two months, and then to start research in an analytical geochemistry lab to develop a new technique. Nothing in my life prepared me for the fraught task of working in an ultraclean lab with fine-grained sediments. After being yelled at in German by a lab technician for years, my science-soulmate, Friedhelm von Blanckenburg, and I, published what turned out to be two relatively important papers using the data of other geochemists. I applied for many jobs, interviewed at many places and took a job at the University of Pennsylvania. My time at the University of Pennsylvania was (mostly) wonderful, partly because my colleagues didn't treat me like a junior faculty member and partly because I got to do science.
However, living in West Philadelphia was eye-opening. I thought a lot about the poverty and violence that surrounded the university and how my experience being poor was so different from the experience of the kids in my new neighborhood. I had nutritious food that we grew, my school was safe and I could check out as many books as I liked from the library. I started a citizen science campaign called Soil Kitchen to test the urban environment for Pb and other metals to try and make things better in Philadelphia and other urban centers. This activity formed the hallmark of the Broader Impacts section of my NSF CAREER proposal and this effort is now a national program.
I married a UPenn professor - now at Stanford - and partly in an effort to live in the same time zone, applied for a dream job at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I set up a lab in the new institution and didn't make the same mistakes as the first time I set up a cosmogenic isotope lab. My husband and I raise our wonderful little girl, and three furry friends sort-of 'together' in San Diego, soon-to-be together at Stanford. It was hard to be a mostly-solo parent for her first 7 years of life while on the tenure track and I'll be happy to finally live together.
Having a daughter was life-changing for me in many ways. I had experienced fairly extreme sexual harassment during my Master's degree at BU (read more here) and had always planned that I would do something about it once I got tenure, but as time went on I thought about that less and less. Having a little girl who said she wanted to be a scientist, triggered me; I filed a Title IX complaint in 2016. That complaint led to many good things - even a documentary film about discrimination and harassment of women in STEM showing now in theaters (virtually): www.pictureascientist.com.
I try to treat my students and postdocs like colleagues and my colleagues like friends. I still have the sense of wonder and curiosity I had as a kid and this makes me want to better understand the Earth and this is still how I 'play.' I have fun doing science every single day.

Anne Churchland (May 26, 2020)

Official story
Anne Churchland received a PhD in Neuroscience from UCSF based on her work studying motion processing and eye movements in macaque monkeys. She worked under the supervision of Steve Lisberger. She was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow with Mike Shadlen, then at the University of Washington, studying decision-making in nonhuman primates. Next, she became an Assistant Professor at Cold Spring Harbor laboratory in New York, and started a research group focussing on multisensory decision-making in rodents. Her research in this topic has implicated both cortical and subcortical circuits in the computations that support these decisions. She also discovered that even the brains of expert decision-makers are often donated by signals unrelated to the decision at hand, such as idiosyncratic fidgets. She is now an Associate Professor and the Neuroscience Chair at Cold Spring Harbor. She has also co-organized many conferences including Cosyne and Canonical Computations in Brains and Machines and she is the founder of anneslist.net.

Unofficial story
Anne grew up as the daughter of some philosophers which means people always ask her if she grew up having interesting dinner table conversations. In fact, she did! However these conversations did not make her particularly enthusiastic about science. She somewhat liked math as a teenager but really preferred canoeing in the wilderness. In college, she gained an interest in developmental psychology which is a totally awesome field and got Anne thinking about the brain. To pursue this passing interest, Anne became a technician after graduating college and worked in Steve Lisberger's lab at UCSF. She really liked running experiments and analyzing data, and found this almost as fun as going on canoe trips. It helped a lot that the people in the lab were nice, and would assist each other when they ran into difficulties. At the end of grad school, Anne had a baby and then had another baby 2 years later. Being a parent to 2 small children as a postdoc both ameliorated and exacerbated the many challenges Anne faced during that period [small children often have this dual effect on challenges]. After struggling for a long time on the job market, Anne got a job at Cold Spring Harbor and planned to study decision-making in rodents. At the time, this was quite a novel idea and most people laughed at Anne's plan to pursue it. Anne loved being a PI pretty much immediately. She really liked interacting with the people in her lab, and enjoyed hearing their ideas about the science. She also liked that she was able to create a lab culture in which people spoke critically about each other's ideas, but did it in a way that kept the conversation going. Anne would like to keep being a PI for a long time, albeit with a few canoe trips (and some interesting dinner conversations) sprinkled along the way.

Kathryn Bonnen (Mar 6, 2020)

Official story
Kathryn Bonnen is a Simons Foundation postdoctoral research fellow in the Center for Neural Science at New York University (NYU), working with Dr. Eero Simoncelli and Dr. Michael Landy. She received a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Psychology from Michigan State University and earned her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Texas at Austin. Her doctoral research was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Harrington fellowship. Working with Dr. Alexander Huk and Dr. Lawrence Cormack, her research focused on the neural mechanisms of 3D motion perception and the development of novel paradigms for studying visual perception. After graduate school, Bonnen worked as an ARVO/VSS fellow and visiting scholar in the Optometry School, at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied the effect of certain types of visual impairment on sensorimotor tasks like walking. Bonnen's current research at NYU focuses on understanding neural information processing in mammalian visual systems. By measuring the statistical properties of the natural world and combining that knowledge with models of neural processing and behavior, she aims to better understand the neural representations that inform visually guided behavior.

Unofficial story
Kate (or Katie, depending on who you ask) was born and raised in Austin, Texas. Her interest in the human brain began pretty early in life. She had her first seizure (yes, the convulsing, falling down kind) when she was 9 years old. She remembers that day in great detail. She was supposed to be going to the bookstore but instead there was a visit to the pediatrician, her second seizure (which included an unfortunate bout of projectile vomiting at a very busy post office), her first ambulance ride, and her third seizure. At some point that day or shortly thereafter she was diagnosed with epilepsy. During the years that followed, it became clear to her that adults really had no idea how the brain worked. As a result, she spent a fair amount of time reading books and articles about epilepsy at the main library at the University of Texas. None of it made much sense to her, but for a few years she thought she would become a neurologist so she could figure it out. About four years after her first seizure, her doctor declared that she no longer had epilepsy. Her childhood was otherwise fairly uneventful. She was good at school and she played a lot of tennis. By the end of high school she had decided she was far too squeamish to survive medical school. It seemed unlikely she would outgrow her tendency toward sympathetic vomiting and passing out at the sight of needles. But she sort of liked calculus, so she planned to study math at university to become high school math teacher. She attended Michigan State University where she spent most of the first couple of years going to tennis practice and taking classes in math, psychology, education, Spanish, engineering, and computer science, while trying to ignore the fact she would eventually have to pick a degree to finish. In her third year, she realized that she no longer wanted to play tennis every day and that she would need to pick a degree to finish. She quit the tennis team and decided to finish the computer science degree. Because of a research mentor (Dr. Jain), she spent her last summer of undergrad working as a summer intern/programmer at the MPI in Tübingen, Germany. It was there that she began to discover that she could use computer science and math to study the brain. When she applied for PhD programs that Fall she included neuroscience programs. She was accepted into all the computer science programs and only one neuroscience program. She honestly can't explain why she chose to study neuroscience in graduate school - it was a gut decision. She moved home to Austin and started her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Texas. The transition from engineer to scientist was bumpy. It took a couple years before she stopped feeling that she had made the wrong choice, but she muddled through. She took up gardening which seemed to keep her calm and certainly increased her vegetable intake. Around 2-3 years into grad school, she settled on a dissertation project studying 3D motion processing. Her two advisors, Alex and Larry, were incredibly supportive and didn't seem to mind that she had a tendency to get distracted by a variety of side projects both inside and outside the lab. Kate has been a postdoc at NYU for over a year now. She suspects that if she were to write this story in a couple of years she would have a lot to say about the challenges of her transition from graduate school to postdoctoral work and the simultaneous changes in her personal life. But the dust is still settling on that chapter so you'll have to ask her about that sometime down the road. Her research program in visual neuroscience and human perception is far removed from the study of epilepsy, but she hopes that her contributions to our understanding of how the brain works would please her nine year-old self.

György Buzsáki (Jan 10, 2020)

Official story
György Buzsáki obtained an MD degree from University of Pécs in 1974, Hungary and a PhD in Neurobiology from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1984. He is Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at New York University. His main focus is "neural syntax", i.e., how segmentation of neural information is organized by the numerous brain rhythms to support cognitive functions. He identified the cellular-synaptic basis of hippocampal theta, gamma oscillations and "sharp wave ripples", their relationship to each other and to behavior and sleep. He has shown that neuronal oscillations span several orders of magnitude in time and form a hierarchical system so that the phase of the slower oscillation modulates the amplitude of the faster one and so on. Within this general framework, his laboratory focuses on the mechanisms of memory and associated diseases, in particular how sleep affects experienced events. His most influential work is the two-stage model of memory trace consolidation. Buzsáki is among the top 1% most-cited neuroscientists, member of the National Academy of Sciences USA, member of the European Academy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Fellow of AAAS, and he sits on the editorial boards of several leading neuroscience journals, including Science and Neuron, honoris causa at Université Aix-Marseille, France, University of Pécs and University of Kaposvár, Hungary. He is a co-recipient of the 2011 Brain Prize. (Books: G. Buzsáki , Rhythms of the Brain, Oxford University Press, 2006; The Brain from Inside Out, OUP 2019)

Unofficial story
As far as I remember, there was only one rule. "Be home before it gets dark." The definition of darkness was, of course, negotiable. I lived in complete freedom, growing up in the streets with other kids from the neighborhood. We made up rules, invented games and wandered around the reeds, losing ourselves only to find our way out, developing a sense of direction and self-reliance. I grew up in a child's paradise, even if those years were the worst times of the communist dictatorship in Hungary for my parents' generation. My childhood included many animals: turtles, a family of hedgehogs, fish in a toilet tank, pigeons, and barn owls, in addition to our family's cats and chickens. Our pig, Rüszü, and I were good friends. He was always eager to get out from his sty and follow me to our favorite destination, a small, shallow bay of Lake Balaton. The lake was the source of many happy moments of my early life. It provided everything I needed: swimming during the summer, skating in the winter, and fishing most of the year around. Summers were special. My parents rented out our two bedrooms, bathroom, and kitchen to vacationers from Budapest, and we temporarily moved up to the attic. Once my father told me that one of the vacationers was a "scientist-philosopher" who knew everything. I wondered how it would be possible to know everything. I took every opportunity to follow him around to figure out whether I could discover something special about his head or eyes. But he appeared to be a regular guy with a good sense of humor. I asked him what Rüszü thought about me and why he could not talk to me. He gave me a long answer with many words that I did not understand, and, at the end, he victoriously announced, "Now you know." Yet I did not, and I kept wondering whether my pig friend's seemingly affectionate love was the same as my feelings for him. Perhaps my scientist knew the answer, but I did not understand the words he used. Here began my problem with words used in scientific explanations. My early curiosity has never evaporated. I became a scientist as a consequence of striving to understand the true meaning behind explanations. Too often, what my peers understood to be a logical and straightforward answer remained a mystery to me. I had difficulty comprehending gravity in high school. OK, it is an "action at a distance" or a force that attracts a body having mass toward another physical body. But are these statements not just another way of saying the same thing? My physics teacher's answer about gravity reminded me the explanation of Rüszü's abilities given by "my" scientist. My troubles with explanatory terms only deepened during my medical student and postdoctoral years and I realized that too often, when we do not understand something, we make up a word or two and pretend that those words solve the mystery. As part of our mandatory paramilitary education, I chose a ham radio course. I was mesmerized by the sound of the Morse code sounds, especially when our instructor told us that somebody from New Zealand had responded to his call he sent out from our transmitter. The operator on the other side of the world informed us about the sunny weather there, the receiving conditions, the details of his rig, and the antenna type he used. My surprise only increased when I figured out that our instructor did not speak either English or Maori, and presumably the operator in New Zealand did not understand Hungarian. Instead, I was informed, they "spoke" to each other with dots (short pulses) and dashes (long pulses), through a universal language in which all words consist of three letters, called Q-code. To be part of such a conversation, all I had to do was to learn Morse code, memorize the Q language, learn a bit about electronics, pass exams, get a license, build a transmitter and receiver, and set up a wire antenna between the chimneys of our house and the neighbor's. Then I could communicate with any ham radio around the globe. That is exactly what I did, and the problem of coding has bugged me ever since. Falling in love with radio communication gave me a sense of direction. I had a dream. Be the first person to shoot a signal to the Moon and detect its bounced version. Unfortunately, my high-school plan to become an electrical engineer was vetoed by my parents, and I had to choose between Medical School and Law School options. I applied to Medical School. While my friends were having fun at the School of Engineering in Budapest, learning exciting stories about radio transmission and electronic oscillators, I spent most of my time studying the unending details of bones and ligaments in the anatomy class. But one day in the physiology class, Professor Endre Grastyán talked about how the brain outputs, such as movement and cognition, control its inputs, rather than the other way around. Even in the most complex animals, the goal of cognition is the guidance of action. Back then in the 1970s, when Pavlovian sensory-sensory association was the dominant ideology in the East and stimulus-decision-response paradigm dominated Western thinking (and has remained so to this day), Grastyán's teachings were unusual, to say the least. From that lecture on, my life acquired new meaning. I applied to become his apprentice, got accepted and spent most of my student life in his laboratory. It was here where I first learned about the hippocampal "theta" rhythm, the oscillation that has become my obsession ever since. My story, thus, is typical of most scientists: a career inspired by a charismatic individual. The most important thing in life is to find a goal. The second step is to figure out how to make a living to achieve that goal. But that is another story, which we will discuss in the seminar.

Adam Carter (Dec 6, 2019)

Official story
Adam Carter is a Professor in the Center for Neural Science at New York University. He received a BA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University in 1997, specializing in neuroscience. He obtained a PhD from Harvard University in 2002, studying synaptic transmission in the cerebellum with Wade Regehr. He then did a postdoc at Harvard Medical School, working with Bernardo Sabatini on dendritic Ca2+ signaling in the striatum. Adam joined NYU as an Assistant Professor in 2007, with his new lab focused on synaptic physiology and modulation in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013, around when his lab started to explore circuits in the PFC and striatum. He became a full Professor in 2019, and his lab now studies the organization, function and plasticity of multiple brain regions involved in motivated behavior. In addition to his federal funding, Adam has received awards from NARSAD, Klingenstein, Whitehall, Dana and McKnight. He is also very involved in teaching neuroscience to both undergraduate and graduate students at NYU. He has trained nine PhD students and several postdoctoral fellows, including three who have started their own labs.

Unofficial story
Adam was born in England and grew up in upstate New York, where he was mostly interested in art and sports. He started to focus on academics in high school, especially after his family moved out west to Minnesota. After taking most of his senior classes at the U of M, he decided to focus on science instead of the humanities. As an undergrad, Adam discovered neuroscience, and worked on psychophysics in the lab of Horace Barlow. As a grad student, he had originally planned to work on vision, but quickly became captivated by neurons and synapses. He was lucky to join a small but established lab that had great postdocs and students, where his advisor Wade helped channel his enthusiasm into papers. As a postdoc, he joined a brand-new lab, where he learned cutting-edge techniques, and was encouraged by his mentor Bernardo to tackle hard problems. Adam attributes his success over the past decade at NYU to his amazing students and postdocs, helpful faculty mentors, and most of all, incredibly supportive family.

David Schneider (Nov 8, 2019)

Official story
David earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with a focus on control systems and prosthetics. During his undergraduate years, he spent two summers as an intern at a medical device company, where he holds a patent for the software and hardware he developed for building intelligent pacemakers. David then earned a master's degree in biomedical engineering, where he used electrophysiology, behavior, and computational modeling to study how barn owls hunt their prey. After finishing his M.S., David spent 11 months as a research assistant at Columbia University. During that short time he performed experiments leading to 3 manuscripts on primate behavior, vision and attention. The following year David continued at Columbia as a graduate student, rotating through three labs, one of which resulted in a first author paper. David joined the lab of Sarah Woolley as its first graduate student, where he published 8 more papers (3 first author) and received multiple fellowships and awards, including an NRSA. David moved to Duke University for a postdoc in 2012 and published his first 2 papers within 24 months. As a postdoc he was the recipient of a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation postdoctoral fellowship and an Allison Doupe Fellowship from the McKnight Foundation. David does not have a K99/R00, but only because he declined it (after receiving a perfect score of 10) to accept a Career Award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. David started his lab at NYU in January of 2018 and was recently named a Searle Scholar.

Unofficial story
David grew up in rural North Dakota. He was a mediocre student in high school and applied to exactly one college, North Dakota State University, where it took him 5 years to earn a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. It took 5 years because he nearly flunked out in years 2 and 3 and rarely attended class except in years 1 and 5. Despite bad grades and a broken compass, he applied to 4 masters programs and got into 1, for the sole reason that the chair at that department was a former professor at NDSU. When he finished his MS, he applied to 11 PhD programs and was rejected by all of them. The next obvious step (to him) was to cold-call the director of graduate studies at Columbia (where he had just been rejected) and ask if there were any labs that would hire him for a year. There was, so he moved to New York. David worked at Columbia for a year, reapplied to grad school and was accepted everywhere he applied this time. Since starting his PhD, David has naively interacted with PIs as if they were peers. This includes the time he bumped into Richard Axel at a bodega the summer before grad school and told him he was going to join his lab for his first rotation. He did indeed rotate in the Axel lab, and was paired up with a sociopathic postdoc who provoked David's first anxiety attacks and just about made him drop out of grad school. But David recovered, ended up studying bird brains with Sarah Woolley, then moved to Duke for a postdoc before coming back to NYC in 2018. David's path eventually worked because he married someone much smarter than him and because rather than work 80 hour weeks, he spends most of his evenings and weekends hanging out with his children.

Heather McKellar (Sep 20, 2019)

Official story
Heather McKellar earned her Ph.D. in Cellular, Molecular, and Biophysical Studies from Columbia University and her B.A. in Biology from Boston University. During her graduate training she helped start the Columbia University Neuroscience Outreach Group, which led to the 2011 Next Generation Award from the Society for Neuroscience. She joined the Neuroscience Institute in September 2011, about a month after its official start date, as an admin assistant supporting two labs. Heather founded the Neuroscience Outreach Group at NYU (NOGN) in 2011 and hosted the first NYU Community Brain Fair during Brain Awareness Week 2012. Her interest in outreach also led her to serve as the President of the Greater New York Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience (braiNY) from 2015-2018 and continue as a member of its executive board. When Nina Gray became the Administrative Director in 2013, Heather took over the management of the graduate program and numerous projects in the areas of community engagement. This past June she was promoted to be the third Executive Director of the Neuroscience Institute, working closely with Dick Tsien and overseeing a team of 12 staff members.

Unofficial story
Heather was born and raised in a small town in the northwest corner of Connecticut. She learned to love education and bureaucracy (kidding) from her special-education-teacher mom and state-employee dad. Heather was an incredibly shy child who learned about imposter syndrome early when she attended an elite boarding school as a day student. But, she also found her love of science in the school's state-of-the-art classroom labs where she dissected her first fetal pig and applied for her first fellowship. Heather went to Boston University as a way to broaden her horizons and escape small town CT for the city. It wasn't until she got into a lab the summer before her junior year that she truly settled on neuroscience as her major. After graduation she didn't have a plan until a friend convinced her to move to NYC, so she sent a bunch of letters (by mail!) and received an offer to be a technician with Rae Silver at Columbia. After not getting into the neuroscience graduate program at Columbia, Rae Silver saw promise (or took pity) in her and helped her application find its way to the Integrated Program. Unfortunately, that is where she slowly realized that lab life was not for her. A fellow student dragged her to an outreach classroom visit as a way to recharge, and she became hooked. Heather helped organize the early stages of the Columbia University Neuroscience Outreach Group and made the connections with the Greater New York Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience (braiNY), the New York Academy of Sciences, and Dana Foundation that led to her job with NYU and her role as President of braiNY. At the end of graduate school, she realized that outreach could be a career when her friend was named Director of Neuroscience Outreach at Columbia's new Zuckerman Institute. She emailed Rob Froemke and Gord Fishell, who were scientific connections with her lab, and her letter ended up on the desk of the new Executive Director who convinced her to come on as an admin assistant who would have spare time to run an outreach program. Heather quickly took on more and more and more tasks and projects in her role. This past May, she started her new role as Executive Director and is still learning the ins and outs. In her free time, Heather loves to cook with her fiancé, have wine nights with her friends from Columbia that are a wonderful and supportive network, and do arts and crafts with her nieces and nephew. She relies on outreach and her volunteer positions to recharge and her favorite item in her office remains the plastinated human brain.

Bianca Jones Marlin (Jul 19, 2019 and Oct 21, 2020)

Official story
Bianca Jones Marlin is a neuroscientist and postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University. She holds a PhD in neuroscience from New York University, and dual bachelor degrees from St. John's University, in biology and adolescent education. Bianca is currently mentored by Nobel Laureate Dr. Richard Axel, and investigates transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, or how traumatic experiences in parents affect the brain structure of their offspring. As a graduate student with Dr. Robert Froemke, she examined how the brain adapts to care for a newborn and how a baby's cry can control adult behavior. Her graduate research has been featured in Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Scientific America and Discover Magazine's "100 Top Stories of 2015". She is the recipient of the 2016 Society for Neuroscience Donald B. Lindsley Award, which recognizes the most outstanding PhD thesis in the general area of behavioral neuroscience and was named a STAT Wunderkind in 2017. She is currently a Junior Fellow in the prestigious Simons Society of Fellows. A native New Yorker, Dr. Marlin lives in Manhattan with her scientist husband, Joseph, their daughter, Sage, and their cat Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who is named after the famed neuroanatomist. Dr. Marlin's research program aims to utilize neurobiology and the science of learning to better inform both the scientific and educational community on how positive experiences dictate brain health, academic performance, and social well-being.

Unofficial story
Bianca was born in Queens, New York. Her mother immigrated from Guyana, South American and met her dad, a Queens native. Being a black American, her father faced life-threatening racism growing up, racism that prohibited him from attending his high school graduation because of death threats sent to him and his family from students in their predominately white school. After a few years in Queens, her parents moved to Central Islip, Long Island. There, her mother delivered newspaper for Long Island's "Newsday" company at night and her father started a home improvement company. One of the most tangible memories Bianca recalls of her childhood is staying up all night in the dusty newspaper depot warehouse to collate the separate paper sections for the Sunday delivery, then jumping in the car to deliver them to hundreds of neighbors before sunrise. Albeit a memory that was not always pleasant, she knows it taught her hard work and dedication to any trade. Out in Long Island her parents had more children and also started the process of being foster care and adoptive parents - a decision that influences Bianca's research program to this day. She graduated from the local high school and applied to only two colleges. Counselors at that time suggested being enrolled into the local community college, but she had heard of St. John's University through a summer mail pamphlet, and applied there as well. She had an extremely competitive resume at this stage, but was told schools such as NYU and Harvard would be too big and expensive to attend - advice that disappoints her to this day. She went to St. Johns where she dual majored in biology and adolescent education in hopes to provide better guidance in education than her failing high-school was afforded. During her first semester she scored a scholarship. During her second semester, she lost it. Her GPA fell below the necessary 3.3 as she also struggled with a nearly 3.5 hour commute to and from class. (She got kicked out of housing for not paying the deposit on time.) She was able to get her studies in order and started working in a lab once her scholarship was reinstated. She was accepted into a summer undergraduate research program at Vanderbilt University and based on her research there, she was invited to apply to a place called MIT for the undergraduate research. She hadn't heard about it before, and didn't see the allure until she watched a movie called "21", where smart MIT undergrads used card counting to beat the casino system. She decided to apply. She worked in the lab of Dr. Martha Constantine Paton. These two experiences solidified her decision to combine skills in childhood education and biology and apply to grad school in Neuroscience. Bianca was the first in her family to graduate with a bachelor's degree. She also graduated president of her campus, amongst other prestigious recognitions. She applied to three grad schools (which probably wasn't a good idea), but got interviews to all 3. She was rejected from Princeton and decided UCLA was too big of a jump for this small-town New Yorker. She decided to attend New York University. Knowing she had to pay for housing for the first few months of grad school, she worked at IHOP (one of her favorite jobs to date). During her first week in grad school, she was told by a classmate that she was only accepted because she was black - a comment that weighed over her for a large portion of her academic career. She was rejected from a rotation because she was told by the PI that there was "no space in the lab" only to have another student ask the same PI and be offered space in that same lab. She did 5 rotations, the final being that of the lab of Dr. Robert Froemke. He had just started at NYU and hadn't unpacked boxes yet. She struggled to pass classes and to get an intracellular recording from a single cell. It took four months to realize that she had been recording cells the whole time - they just didn't reflect the textbook electrical signature she had expected. That realization gave her a blast of confidence on all fronts - one that she has carried throughout her time as a scientist. She concluded that as we continue to learn more about our everchanging world - "The Standard" changes.

Stacie Grossman Bloom (Jun 7, 2019)

Official story
Stacie Grossman Bloom earned her Ph.D. in cell biology from Georgetown University and her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Delaware. A molecular neurobiologist by training, she completed her postdoctoral training at the Rockefeller University in the lab of Nobel laureate Paul Greengard studying the neurological basis for disease. Dr. Bloom was an associate editor at Nature Medicine, then Vice President and Scientific Director of The New York Academy of Sciences. She was awarded a Society for Neuroscience prize for outstanding dedication to mentorship, and held fellowships at the National Institutes of Health, National Institutes of Mental Health, National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, and the Rockefeller University's Women in Science Program. A prolific author and speaker, she was featured most recently in Forbes, on SiriusXM radio, the BBC, at the National Academy of Sciences, and at The Women in the World summit. Stacie joined NYU Langone Medical Center in 2011 as inaugural Executive Director for the Neuroscience Institute and then became Assistant Vice President for Policy and Administration. Now she serves as Vice Provost of Research at NYU, working closely with the president, provost, deans, faculty, and senior administrators to facilitate, energize, and grow the University's research enterprise and its impact.

Unofficial story
Stacie was born in Brooklyn to a native Brooklyn mother and an immigrant father from Romania. Her grandparents were miraculous holocaust survivors. Her early childhood is probably similar to that of the offspring of many other Jewish immigrant families where an education was seen as the most important thing for the family to secure their place in the United States. Perhaps in that way Stacie's fate was sealed, however the nearly half century from then to now has been twisty and unexpected. Stacie went to high school in Spring Valley, just north of NYC in a diverse, middle-class neighborhood where her grades and test scores were good enough to get her into the University of Delaware. The first in her family to go off to college, Stacie majored in Psychology and earned herself a mediocre 3.2 GPA. In her junior year, she started taking graduate level neuroscience courses and the world unfolded around her, mysterious and magical. Her grades in those classes were all A's and, able to show a positive academic trajectory and good (enough) GRE scores, she applied for PhD programs in neuroscience while a senior in college. Stacie was accepted to Georgetown's interdisciplinary program in Neuroscience on the premise that she start three months before her classmates, due to her utter lack of wet lab experience. She rallied in graduate school, publishing her very first paper in the respectable Journal of Neuroscience and earning a PhD in five years. Stacie left DC for the Rockefeller University where she started a post doc in Paul Greengard's lab five months before he won the Nobel Prize. While her postdoc experience was the stuff of dreams (Money! Equipment! Housing! Grants! Papers! Free food!), Stacie knew she was not cut out for the lab life. She left the lab in 2002 to do an internship at Nature Medicine, where she later became assistant ,then associate editor. She refers to this transition from post-doc to editor as going from being an inch wide and a mile deep in a small field to being a mile wide and an inch deep in biomedicine. After a few years and with an enormous network, Stacie's aspirations led her to The New York Academy of Sciences where, over the course of five years and the birth of three children, she ultimately became the Vice President and Scientific Director. When her smallest child was 1, Stacie accepted a role as the inaugural Executive Director of the NYU Neuroscience Institute, where she spent two years working side by side with Dick Tsien. She moved onto a larger role in 2013 overseeing finance and administration across NYU Langone's basic science and clinical departments and institutes. In May 2018 she applied for the job of Vice Provost for Research for NYU and she has just completed her first academic year. In her free time, Stacie loves hanging out with her family, reading, hiking, running, and traveling. She attributes her success to her family, and to the many mentors and supporters who have held her up, allowing her to achieve things she would never have even dreamed possible.

Nicolas Tritsch (May 17, 2019)

Official story
Nicolas Tritsch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Physiology at NYU Langone Health. He graduated from McGill University with a B.S. in Immunology and a M.S. in Neuroscience, and obtained a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Bernardo Sabatini at Harvard Medical School, he explored how dopaminergic neurons modulate the activity of brain circuits that control voluntary movements. His laboratory currently focuses on understanding how these circuits orchestrate the initiation, execution and reinforcement of motor actions using a variety of optical, genetic and physiological approaches. He is the recipient of several awards, including the National Institutes of Health Pathway to Independence and New Innovator Awards, the Society for Neuroscience Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Research fellowship in Neuroscience.

Unofficial story
Nic grew up in a small village in Alsace, France, near the border with Switzerland and Germany, spending the better part of his youth enjoying the outdoors. Nic has been freakin' tall (a scientific term to mean well above average) most of his life, averaging a centimeter of vertical grown per month between the ages of 12 and 15. This was not lost on his sports teachers, who suggested he enlist in an intense sport-study program to play volleyball. And that's how Nic spent most of his time in middle school, ultimately earning an opportunity to train with France's national team near Paris. His dream to become a professional volleyball player were crushed (thankfully) when his family relocated to the US. Upon finishing high school at the French Lycée in New York, Nic didn't have a clear sense for what to do next other than 'go to university'. Having not taken the SAT or postulated to prestigious French preparatory schools, he was resigned to return to France to join a local college when he learned that he could apply to McGill University. A trip to Montreal was all it took to fall in love with the city and convince him to pursue a North American education. He owes passing his first semester classes to another foreign student who actually understood what was being taught and graciously shared her notes with him. It is only in his senior year that Nic discovered his interest for Neuroscience in a guest lecture by our very own Steve Burden. Convinced his CV was unremarkable, he did not apply to US schools and instead joined McGill's graduate program. There, Nic not only realized that he enjoyed bench work, he also learned to play ice hockey during 'lunch breaks' and met his future spouse. But he continued to wonder whether the grass was greener South of the border. Despite having initiated his PhD, he tried his luck (but still not to schools he believed to be out of reach), and eight months later he and his wife would pack their suitcases for Baltimore, where Nic would enjoy a wonderful PhD at Johns Hopkins. He might have not sought a postdoc if it weren't for his mentor, Dwight Bergles, who (kindly) pushed him out of the lab after 6 years. By then, Nic was ready to face his impostor syndrome and he joined the bustling lab of Bernardo Sabatini at Harvard. The next six years would be a whirlwind, beginning the work that continues to keep him busy to this day, being a dad to 3 children, interviewing for jobs and eventually realizing the elusive dream of starting his own lab at a top university. To be continued...

Karen Adolph (May 3, 2019)

Official story
Karen E. Adolph is Professor of Psychology, Applied Psychology, and Neural Science at New York University. She uses observable motor behaviors and a variety of technologies (video, motion tracking, instrumented floor, head-mounted eye tracking, EEG, etc.) to study developmental processes. Adolph is Director of the Databrary video library and the PLAY project, and she developed and maintains the Datavyu video-coding tool. Adolph received a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and Ph.D. from Emory University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and Association for Psychological Science and is Past-President of the International Congress on Infant Studies. She received the Kurt Koffka Medal for "worldwide outstanding work on infants' perception/action development", a Cattell Sabbatical Award, the APF Fantz Memorial Award, the APA Boyd McCandless Award, the ICIS Young Investigator Award, FIRST and MERIT awards from NICHD, and five teaching awards from NYU. She chaired the NIH study section on Motor Function and Speech Rehabilitation and serves on the McDonnell Foundation advisory board and editorial boards of Developmental Psychobiology and Motor Learning and Development. Adolph has published 165+ articles and chapters. Her research on perceptual-motor learning and development has been continually funded by NIH since 1991. She currently holds 12 grants.

Unofficial story
Karen is a true imposter in motor development (no background in math, physics, biology, physiology, or movement science). At 17, she quit high school, moved out of her parents' home, and worked as a proofreader and seamstress. She met her actor boyfriend of the next 17 years in the costume shop of a regional theater and began a commuting relationship. After four attempts at college, she graduated from Sarah Lawrence deeply in debt, but steeped in preschool education, fine art, and James Gibson's ecological approach to perception and action. After a year teaching art at the Dalton School (K-3), she was ready for graduate studies. James Gibson was dead, but Eleanor "Jackie" Gibson was not. Jackie could not take graduate students at Cornell, so Dick Neisser brought Jackie and Karen to Emory, where Karen studied infants' perception of affordances for locomotion over slopes. She nearly failed her qualifying exam on the development of walking because the topic was "not sufficiently psychological". So she wrote a predoctoral NRSA and moved her slopes apparatus to Indiana University where Esther Thelen studied walking. Karen turned down a job at Vassar to finish the longitudinal study in her dissertation. All three advisors - Gibson, Neisser, and Thelen - rejected her dissertation, so she wrote a new one that became an SRCD monograph and an article in JEP:HPP. Still trying to get a job in NYC to be with the actor boyfriend, she interviewed unsuccessfully at NYU, did a brief postdoc at Einstein, and then commuted to NYC from a faculty position at Carnegie Mellon. At CMU, she helped to develop a video-coding tool that evolved into Datavyu. After receiving an NIH FIRST award, she interviewed again at NYU. This time, she got the job, but split from the actor, and started a new commuting relationship with a professor at University of Pittsburgh (dramatic irony) who married her and fathered a wonderful daughter. After 12 years, they amicably separated, and Karen started her current commute with a professor at University of Iowa, with whom she bought a house in Maine. (Geography was never her strong point.) A CMU design professor builds the apparatuses (slopes, gaps, bridges, drop-offs, apertures, foam pits, etc.) that furnish her lab. Her 22-year collaboration with NYU professor Catherine Tamis-LeMonda is her longest in-town relationship. Karen directs the Databrary project with Rick Gilmore (her first teaching assistant at CMU), and with Cathie, they run the NIH-PLAY project.

Marisa Carrasco (Mar 15, 2019)

Official story
She investigates visual perception and attention, using human psychophysics, neuroimaging, and computational modeling in order to study the relation between the psychological and neural mechanisms involved in these processes. She grew up in Mexico City and earned her Licentiate in Psychology, specializing in experimental psychology, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she graduated summa cum laude. She then obtained her MS and a PhD in psychology, specializing in cognition and perception, from Princeton University, where she received the highest scholarly excellence award, the Jacobus Honorific Fellowship. She became an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan University, where she was the recipient of an NSF Young Investigator Award and an American Association of University Women Fellowship. She joined NYU (1995) as an Associate Professor and became a Professor of Psychology and Neural Science (2002). From 2001-2007 she served as chair of Psychology. At NYU, she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Cattell Fellowship, and NIH and NSF have continuously supported her research. She has been a senior editor of two scientific journals, Journal of Vision and Vision Research, a fellow of the American Psychological Society, and has been president of both the Vision Sciences Society and the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. A dedicated teacher and mentor of undergrads, grads and postdocs, she received the NYU award for excellence in postdoc mentoring in 2018; she has been Collegiate Professor since 2007, and has been recently named Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science in 2019.

Unofficial story
It all seems so neat and pre-ordained when you line up the stepping stones that lead inexorably to the present. But of course, that apparently smooth narrative toward "who we are now" does not capture how we actually live our lives, or how we experience our careers. Because in some places, there were no visible stepping stones ahead at all, just mud; in other places the stepping stones were so small that a tiptoe balancing act was required; and at almost every step, there were forking paths in front of me, difficult decisions, influenced by will, but also by many aleatory factors like love, laws and just plain luck.
In relative terms, my journey has been comfortable. I grew up in Mexico City in a very supportive home with college-educated parents, in which academics are highly valued. My parents provided everything so my siblings and I could concentrate on our studies and activities we liked (like tennis, music and dance). They instilled in us, with example and words, the ideas of giving our best to whatever we do and of having a strong work ethic. And they unselfishly supported us to pursue our dreams, even when they might take us far from home (studying abroad is not that common in Mexico, and two of my siblings are also faculty members in the US). Ironically, I didn't experience or foresee many of the limitations that in the US are often automatically attributed to me. Throughout my career, I have often been asked if I am in the Spanish Department, and more recently, if I work on immigration studies. (What else could a Mexican professor possibly do?). Sometimes I reply snarkily and laugh, but often I fail to take the opportunity to 'educate' people. I can't help but wonder if these questions are due to my being Mexican, a woman or both.
I could have become a medical doctor or a physicist (two possibilities I entertained through high school, but I decided to pursue psychology. My father, a chemical engineer, was happy I'd specialize in experimental psychology. (As a girl I loved going to his lab on pulp-and-paper and looking through the microscope). I was fortunate to go to the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM, the oldest and largest university on this continent). I had the opportunity to take great classes and seminars and to conduct research. But more importantly, the UNAM opened my eyes to diverse and complex social and political issues in Mexico. I fell in love with research and with visual perception and I wrote a thesis on why simple bars mask letters more than gratings. I decided to apply to graduate school.
I could have gone to a different graduate school. After being accepted by several public universities I learned that as a foreigner I was not eligible for financial aid. As luck would have it, the Mexican agency that gave fellowships to study abroad, due to yet another economic crisis, cancelled their program that year. Luckily, several private universities also accepted me and I chose Princeton (yes, in part because of its proximity to NYC). For my doctoral dissertation I investigated various aspects of spatial vision, temporal vision, and their interaction. I was very fortunate to have a fabulous mentor and friend, Ron Kinchla. Until his passing, we stayed in touch and discussed science, family, politics and life. The last summer of graduate school I attended the first summer institute in cognitive neuroscience held at Harvard, a transformative experience.
After grad school, for technical, legal reasons, most postdoctoral positions were not feasible for me (Columbia and Penn fell through because I was not a green-card holder) and I had to get a job. Fortunately, both Jim (my partner at the time, husband now, whom I met in the dining hall of Princeton's Graduate College) and I got several offers and decided to join Yale and Wesleyan, respectively; the only combination enabling us to live together. (A distinguished Princeton professor scolded me for not accepting the offers of research universities). We had our first son in CT, a course teaching relief for me, but no maternity or paternity leave. Six years later, NYU's Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese recruited Jim and they asked Psychology to consider hiring me. Wesleyan offered Jim a faculty position in an attempt to retain me. We preferred to be in a research university and in NY. Our second son was born weeks after arriving to NYU, and again teaching relief for me, but no maternity or paternity leave. Fast-forward many years, after the passing of one of my dearest friends, we welcomed her son into our family. More unexpected joys and challenges would follow with our three sons.
Since arriving to NYU I have been very fortunate to have supportive colleagues in Psychology and the Center for Neural Science, as well as great graduate students and postdocs, many of them are not only friends but have become family. But the path forward has not always been clear or unobstructed. All along the way I had to convince many colleagues at NYU that attention could be and should be rigorously investigated (many of whom ended up being collaborators; touché!). And through the years, submitting and resubmitting many grants to secure federal funding, it has been difficult being in what we call "the grant cave" but even more difficult coming out of it, to realize that I've fallen behind in many things in the lab and at home.
Juggling research, teaching, and academic service with family life, motherhood, and in recent years, aging parents, has been a difficult but fulfilling balancing act. Constant love and support from Jim and our sons are what have made possible the equilibrium; providing not just more stepping stones, but broad and solid continent-sized rocks on which to forge this path - and not a different one - to this particular present, and beyond.

Robert Froemke (Feb 22, 2019)

Official story
Robert Froemke holds a B.A. in computer science from Tufts. He worked as a technician in Rafa Yuste's lab at Columbia before performing PhD research with Yang Dan at UC Berkeley on spike-timing-dependent plasticity. He was a postdoc with Christoph Schreiner and Mike Merzenich at UCSF, working on synaptic plasticity in vivo and obtaining a K99/R00 before starting his lab at NYU in 2010. He received a Pew Scholarship, a McKnight Scholars award, a Sloan award, and an HHMI Faculty Scholars award. Robert is newly a co-director for the Neural Systems and Behavior course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, having been formerly a student in NS&B as well as a Grass Fellow and a student and lecturer in the Methods in Computational Neuroscience course at the MBL.

Unofficial story
Rob grew up outside Detroit and was the valedictorian of his high school, winning a lot of science fair prizes. Just kidding, he mostly skateboarded with his friends and tried to figure out how to get the heck outta Michigan. He went to art school in Boston (the School of the Museum of Fine Arts) which had no curriculum, but one of the artists there was trying to build an early heads-up display for virtual reality, which sounded great but was totally nonfunctional in practice. Rob realized he knew neither how to draw nor how to program, but the Museum School had a back-door arrangement with Tufts, and Rob started exclusively taking Tufts courses, dropping out of art school while working at a bodega and a used car lot for a few years. After graduating, Rob applied to NYU's Center for Neural Science for grad school and was rejected. Rob moved to Brooklyn in 1998 and audited courses at Columbia until he ran out of money, and asked one of his professors (Rafael Yuste) if anyone needed a programmer; as it turned out, Rafa himself did. Rob re-applied to graduate schools, and since Rafa knew Yang Dan from her Columbia days, Yang accepted Rob to the program and he was her first graduate student. The PhD days were great, and Rob applied for a postdoc to Mike Merzenich's lab in 2003; Mike first said yes but changed his mind and suggested Chris Schreiner at UCSF instead. Chris was also great but didn't have any money, and so Rob's position was contingent on independent funding. A year and a half and several failed grants later, Rob was weeks away from being terminated and applying to medical school when the last possible grant application (from Jane Coffin Childs) was funded in spring 2005. Rob went out on an early faculty job search in 2007 to no avail, and tried again in 2009. Most US schools said no, but a total of five talks at NYU later, there was a position in the otolaryngology department at NYU School of Medicine, and the Skirball Institute had some lab space. The NYU days have been good and challenging, pre- and post-tenure. Nowadays, Rob enjoys family life as a dad and husband.

Cristina Savin (Jan 11, 2019)

Official story
Cristina Savin received her PhD from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, after doing theoretical work on the computational roles of different forms of plasticity in the group of Jochen Triesch at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. She then moved to Cambridge University for a postdoc with Mate Lengyel, followed by a short research visit at Ecole Normale Superiore in Paris in the group of Sophie Deneve, and an independent research fellowship at IST Austria, working in collaboration with Gasper Tkacik and Joszef Csicsvari. Since 2017 she has been an Assistant Professor in the Center for Neural Science and the Center for Data Science at NYU. Her research sits at the intersection between neuroscience and machine learning, with a focus on learning at the level of circuits. Her group develops both theory and new data analysis tools, in collaboration with several experimental partners. Cristina has also recently started an industry collaboration centered on nervous system computer interfaces for medical applications.

Unofficial story
Growing up in a small town in Transylvania, Cristina's vision of possible career options was quite narrow. As someone who excelled academically but felt no passion for any particular subject (beyond reading indiscriminately and painting), she toyed with the idea of going to medical school before finally ending up, almost by chance, as a CS major in high-school and then at the Technical University in Cluj-Napoca. There, she fell in love with both CS and university life; she continued to be top of the class while still painting and generally doing more things that should realistically fit in 24 hours. In her third year, Cristina briefly worked in industry as a software engineer, which helped confirm her choice of staying in academia. In Romania, this would usually mean staying on at the same university and working slowly through the ranks towards a permanent position. Her Dean, one of Cristina's early mentors, pushed her to go abroad for her PhD instead. After some complicated family negotiations, Cristina accepted a PhD position in Frankfurt, working with Jochen Triesch on computational roles of plasticity. Despite struggling with living abroad for the first time and a rather unwelcoming environment, research proceeded relatively smoothly, resulting in several publications and one contributed Cosyne talk. She handed in her thesis after three and a half years. While the questions she was asking during her PhD remained prominent in her mind, by the end of her stay in Frankfurt she was feeling dissatisfied with the methodology. Prompted by a collaboration with Joerg Luecke, at the time a postdoc at the same institute, she started shifting towards machine learning based approaches to studying brain computation. She landed her dream postdoc in Cambridge working in the lab of Mate Lengyel in collaboration with Peter Dayan. It quickly became apparent that she had a great deal to learn, but she persevered and managed to develop several interesting ideas, with corresponding publications. While external validation that she was on the right track was hard to come by, she did manage to get a selective NIPS talk, and after two and a half years she felt she was in a good position to go back on the job market. She had multiple offers, but eventually decided on an independent research fellowship in Vienna as she wanted to focus more on data analysis. Cristina deferred the start date to spend some time in Paris in the lab of Sophie Deneve working on what became one of her first independent lines of research (which brought another NIPS spotlight and a second Cosyne talk). In Vienna, she sat for the first time in an experimental lab and quickly discovered that none of the neuroscientists around were interested in talking to her. It took a few months of participating in journal clubs and research talks until finally someone came to her with a question, and she finally got a stamp of approval when one of her suggestions turned into an actual experiment. In parallel, Cristina started looking into faculty jobs, initially restricting the search to Europe but eventually also sending a few applications in the US, despite strong family opposition. She struggled, and it took a while before starting to get invited for interviews; even longer for an actual offer to materialize. In retrospect, she had very little idea what she was doing and was too proud/embarrassed to ask for help. After the first few rejections, she started doubting that she belonged in academia at all. Fortunately, chance intervened. At the point when she was ready to give up, she received an email encouraging her to apply for a joint CNS-CDS position at NYU. Long story short, she eventually was offered the job. Getting started was not easy, but things are starting to come together thanks to some rather amazing students. Cristina is excited about starting several new collaborations and developing two new grad courses. She looks forward to the challenges ahead.

Maureen Craig (Nov 16, 2018)

Official story
Maureen Craig earned her undergraduate degree in Psychology (with minors in Sociology and Women's Studies) at Purdue University and received her PhD in Social Psychology from Northwestern University. She spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Psychology Department at Ohio State University before joining the New York University Psychology Department as an assistant professor in 2016. Her work focuses on understanding social and political attitudes among members of different social groups (e.g., groups based on race, gender, sexuality), both among individuals belonging to traditionally-stigmatized groups and those belonging to societally-dominant groups (as well as individuals with both types of group identities). Her primary research interests are in how diversity, inequality, and discrimination shape individuals' attitudes and relations with people from other social groups, basic social cognitive processes, policy preferences, and support for collective action.

Unofficial story
Maureen began her undergraduate career as a future civil engineer. She completed her freshman year coursework in an entirely unremarkable way (her only A was in her elective, Introductory Psychology) and was placed into a summer internship near family in Michigan. She spent her summer working in the engineer trailers on several construction sites near Detroit. Over the course of the summer, she had several experiences related to being a young woman in engineering that led her to realize that she would be miserable in this working context. Back at Purdue, she scrambled to pick a new "practical" major whose culture might be more welcoming. After realizing she was trying to pick a major based on what would make sense with her Psychology minor that she refused to drop, she resigned herself to becoming a clinician - the only viable career path for Psych majors, or so she thought. Once Maureen took a class on "Stereotyping and Prejudice" and realized that people can actually make a career of studying these issues, she joined her Stereotyping and Prejudice professor's lab (Stephanie Goodwin) and spent the rest of her undergrad career nerding out conducting psychological research. At Northwestern, she was lucky enough to join the labs of people who were doing important work, but more importantly, who also happened to be amazing mentors (Jenn Richeson and Galen Bodenhausen). After half of her dissertation studies completely flopped and 2 failed faculty job searches, she graduated. Immediately after arriving at Ohio State to start a post-doc, she decided to apply to a few dream jobs "just in case" - one of those places was NYU.

Sachin Ranade (Jul 13, 2018)

Official story
Sachin obtained his PhD in Neuroscience from Stony Brook University. He performed his doctoral research with Zachary Mainen at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) where he studied the behavioural correlates of neurons in the serotonergic dorsal raphe nucleus of rats during an olfactory discrimination task. He continued at CSHL for his postdoctoral research with Adam Kepecs, where he developed the technology to identify channelrhodopsin labeled neurons using optogenetic tagging in freely behaving mice. He applied this technique to elucidate the differential role of two interneuron subtypes, expressing parvalbumin and somatostatin, during a reward foraging task as well as collaborated on applying this technique to study behavioural correlates of different cell types in the cholinergic basal forebrain. He currently works as an Associate Editor at Nature Communications, the flagship open-access journal of the Nature Research Group of journals, where he oversees content in the areas of cognitive, computational and systems neuroscience.

Unofficial story
Growing up in Pune, in Western India, Sachin enjoyed playing basketball, dabbling in Indian classical music and wandering in the surrounding mountains. He always had a keen interest in science. Following an undergraduate degree in Microbiology and a Master's degree in Molecular Biology, he joined a wildlife parasite ecology group as a field biologist to fulfill his wanderlust. He spent a year discovering the diversity of parasitic flora in wild animals while exploring the forests of India. Animal behaviour fascinated him. How does brain activity manifest in such myriad behaviors? With this in mind, he joined the graduate program at Stony Brook University to learn about neuroscience and decided to study the neural basis of olfactory behaviors. After many exploratory projects failed to take off, he inherited an exciting but difficult project. He studied how neurons in the serotonergic dorsal raphe nucleus respond during olfactory decision making. He continued research in CSHL to apply the newly developed tools of optogenetics to identify genetically specified neurons and helped establish this technology in behaving mice. A short stint turned into a 7 year postdoc. While exploring academic positions, an ad for an editorial position in Nature Communications popped up and piqued his interest. It felt like a good fit, given his wide research interests so he joined a fledgling neuroscience editorial team at Nature Communications and has been an integral part of the journal's growth.

Jonathan Pillow (Apr 27, 2018)

Official story
Jonathan Pillow received his Ph.D. from NYU, where he worked in the laboratory of Eero Simoncelli on statistical modeling of spike trains in the early visual system. He then moved to London for a postdoctoral fellowship at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL, and in 2009 became an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the department of Psychology. In 2014, Jonathan moved to Princeton University, where he is currently an associate professor in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Psychology department, and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. Jonathan's current research sits at the border between neuroscience and statistical machine learning, focusing on computational and statistical methods for understanding how large populations of neurons transmit and process information.

Unofficial story
Jonathan grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, the son of a librarian and a preschool teacher. His principal childhood loves were sports and arguing, and he overcame the traumatic experience of failing his third grade multiplication test to find that he also enjoyed math. During the summer before his senior year in high school, Jonathan attended a 5-day summer camp in science and engineering and returned to announce, to the dismay of his parents, that he intended to major in philosophy. He attended college at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he ran on the track and cross country teams and double-majored in philosophy and (in a kind of peace offering to his parents, who urged him to think more pragmatically about his future) math. During the fall semester of his senior year, he was consumed by a rising sense of panic as it slowly dawned on him that college would not last forever. Casting about for a senior thesis advisor, Jonathan had the good fortune to meet Rich Zemel, an assistant professor in the Psychology department who worked on neural population coding. Rich gave Jonathan a paper to peruse and suggested they meet up the following week to discuss ideas; Jonathan spent that week mostly not reading the paper, then went to the meeting to tell Rich that, thank you very much for the offer, but he hadn't been able to understand the paper, and he'd decided to do a senior thesis with a philosophy professor instead. Luckily for Jonathan, Rich clarified that he hadn't meant for Jonathan to actually *understand* the paper---just get the gist of ideas Rich was thinking about, and that he thought that Jonathan had the right background for that kind of work if Jonathan would only apply himself. Grateful for the vote of confidence, Jonathan shut the door to philosophy once and for all and, with Rich's guidance, applied to Ph.D. programs in neuroscience. Despite a mere three months of research experience and an application essay that focused largely on how electrified he was by Roger Penrose's writings on quantum theories of consciousness, he was accepted. Although Jonathan believed that his future lay in neuroscience, he --- in yet another decision that he struggled to explain to his parents --- deferred graduate school to spend a year studying arabic and North African literature in Morocco. When at last he arrived at NYU, Jonathan struggled to overcome a total lack of science coursework during college, and was grateful to classmates who took the time to explain to him basic concepts from biology like what phosphorylation was and why he should care. Jonathan spent a long time in lab rotations before joining a thesis lab, studying illusory contour perception with Nava Rubin and learning to patch neurons with Alex Reyes, an experience that convinced him (as if there was ever any doubt) that he was not cut out for experimental work. Toward the end of his second year of graduate school, Eero Simoncelli handed Jonathan a book on Bayesian graphical models, and Jonathan decided to tackle the problem of understanding the computational role of feedback projections in the brain from first principles. Meanwhile, Odelia Schwartz (a 4th-year student working on spike-triggered analysis methods) inspired Jonathan to undertake a side project applying some of Odelia's ideas to integrate-and-fire neurons. Jonathan pursued these ideas in collaboration with Liam Paninski, a 1st year student who (to Jonathan's considerable consternation) knew a lot more math and was far more skilled at having good ideas and writing them up into scientific papers. Jonathan has been working on the offshoots of these ideas ever since, though hopes to one day return to the original topic of his thesis, and occasionally still attempts to bust out philosophical insights while his wife and two young children run for cover.

Michael Long (Apr 6, 2018)

Official story
Michael Long received his PhD from Brown University, where he worked in the laboratory of Barry Connors examining the role of electrical synapses in the mammalian brain. He then shifted his focus to the songbird model system during his postdoctoral years working with Michale Fee at MIT. Michael moved to the NYU School of Medicine in 2010, where he is currently an Associate Professor in the Neuroscience Institute with a clinical affiliation in the Department of Otolaryngology. He was won numerous early career awards, including the NYSCF Robertson Investigator award, a Klingenstein Fellowship and the Rita Allen Foundation scholars award. Although the Long laboratory primarily investigates the neural circuitry that gives rise to vocal production in the songbird as well as a nontraditional rodent species, the scope of research within the lab has recently expanded into the clinical realm, with an emphasis on the brain processes underlying speech perception and production. In addition to his research accomplishments, Michael also serves as the Associate Director for Research of the NYU Neuroscience Institute and was appointed to the editorial board for Current Opinion in Neurobiology and the development chair for the Cosyne meeting. A few years ago, he founded the SPiNES seminar series that has given external postdocs an opportunity to share their research with the greater NYU Neuroscience community.

Unofficial story
Michael was an undergraduate at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, a small liberal arts school that lacked a neuroscience major. During that time, Michael authored and directed a play based on a schizophrenic teenager and started a schoolwide science symposium to celebrate original research ranging from economics to physics. Upon finishing college with degrees in Biology and Psychology, Michael decided to go to graduate school, sending applications to clinical psychology graduate programs and was promptly rejected from all 10 of them. Determined to seek out more mechanistic work, Michael took a job as a technician in a molecular biology laboratory and eventually applied to several neuroscience programs. The week before the graduate decisions were due, Brown University decided to bring him in for an interview and ultimately accepted him for admission. Twenty years later, Rhodes College invited him back to deliver the keynote address for the science symposium that he founded - now known as URCAS (Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Symposium) - which had since grown to an all-day event.

Eric Klann (Mar 2, 2018)

Official story
Eric Klann received his B.S. in Chemistry from Gannon University in 1984 and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine in 1989. He did postdoctoral training at Baylor College of Medicine with David Sweatt before taking his first faculty position in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh in 1994. In 2001, he moved to the Department of Molecular Physiology at Baylor College of Medicine where remained until 2006 before joining the Center for Neural Science (CNS) at New York University (NYU), where is now Professor and Director. His research is focused on the molecular mechanisms of translational control and their role in activity-dependent changes in synaptic function and behavior, including cognition. He also studies how dysregulated translational control contributes to altered synaptic function and aberrant behaviors in developmental brain disorders and neurodegenerative disease. He has published over 160 original research articles, reviews, commentaries, and book chapters. He served as a Reviewing Editor for the Journal of Neuroscience, currenlty serves as a Section Editor for Brain Research, and is on the editoral boards of several other journals. He is a former member and chair of the Neural Oxidative Metabolism and Death and Molecular and Cellular Substrates of Complex Disorders Study Sections of the National Institutes of Health. He serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards for the Pitt Hopkins Syndrome Foundation and the Foundation for Angelman Syndrome Therapeutics, where he is also the Chair. He also has served on the Fragile X Outcomes Measures and TSC Neurocognitive Working Groups for the National Institutes of Health. He has served as the Treasurer and the President of the Molecular and Cellular Cognition Society. He is the recipient of a NARSAD Distinguished Investigator Award and the Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from the National Instittutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Unofficial story
Eric grew up in a steel town in Western Pennsylvania just north of Pittsburgh, where he spent most of his time trying to stay out of trouble by studying and playing sports, primarily basketball. Despite being ranked 5th in a class of 867 at his high school, he decided to go to Gannon University to play Division II basketball and major in chemistry with the idea of eventually becoming an M.D. However, afternoon biology and chemistry labs conflicted with basketball practice, so he stopped playing at the collegiate level after his freshman year to concentrate on his grades in order to get into medical school. After working for two summers during college at the hospital across the street from his home, Eric realized that he didn't really like sick people, so he reasoned that it probably was unwise to become an M.D. He didn't really like chemistry either, so not knowing what to do, he decided to get a Ph.D. in biochemistry in any graduate program that would take him. Eric spent the next five years at the then Medical College of Virginia in Richmond working on his Ph.D with Keith Shelton studying nuclear proteins and molecular signaling. He was an average graduate student who spent 4 to 5 days a week playing basketball in 3 different leagues. Things turned around for him scientifically after Keith told him that he really needed to be as competitive in the lab as he was on the basketball court. Eric took this advice to heart and began working harder in the lab. He also met his future wife Amy, who was working as a summer student in a microbiology lab down the hall from his lab, which provided additional motivation for him to focus and finish his Ph.D. as quickly as possible. Eric became interested in neuroscience because one of the proteins he worked on was enriched in the brain, so he decided to do his postdoctoral work on molecular signaling involved in synaptic plasticity and memory. At a meeting in Chicago he met David Sweatt, who was finishing his postdoc with Eric Kandel and was going to start his own group at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Eric jumped at the opportunity to work with David, thinking he would be working on the regulation of protein synthesis in long-term sensitization in Aplysia. However, David decided to begin working in the mammalian hippocampus studying kinases in long-term potentiation. This was a bit problematic for Eric since David had little or no experience recording from rat hippocampal slices. Fortunately, Dan Johnston's lab was close by and he kindly allowed his graduate students and postdocs to teach Eric how to make slices and do recordings. During this time Amy got her Ph.D. in microbiology at Baylor. Eric's postdoctoral fellowship was productive and he was able to obtain a faculty position in 1994 at the University of Pittsburgh, where Amy also began her postdoctoral fellowship. Being back in Western Pennsylvania, they were close to most of Eric's family and many of his friends perhaps too many. Despite being able to go to many Pittsburgh Steeler, Penguin, and Pirate games in those years, in 2001 Eric and Amy decided to move back to Houston where he was finally able to begin working on translational control in the nervous system, only 12 years behind schedule. He also began working on mouse models of developmental brain disorders and neurodegenerative disease. During this time Amy began law school, eventually becoming a patent attorney. In 2005, she moved to New York City to begin practicing law, which meant that Eric needed to find another job. Fortunately, CNS was looking for a molecular neuroscientist studying synaptic plasticity and memory, and Eric joined the faculty of NYU in 2006, where he has been ever since.

Wendy Suzuki (Feb 2, 2018)

Official story
Wendy Suzuki received her undergraduate degree in physiology and human anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987 studying with Prof. Marion C. Diamond, a leader in the field of brain plasticity. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from U.C. San Diego in 1993 with David Amaral, Stuart Zola and Larry Squire and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health with Robert Desimone before accepting her faculty position at New York University in 1998.Wendy is currently a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at New York University. She is best known for her studies on the anatomy, physiology and function of the non-human primate brain areas in the medial temporal lobe critical for long-term memory. More recently she has started to examine the neuro-behavioral, physiological and neurochemical effects of physical aerobic activity on a wide range of brain and cognitive functions in people. She is the recipient of the Donald B. Lindsley Award from the Society for Neuroscience as well as the prestigious Troland Research award from the National Academy of Sciences as well as an award-winning teacher.

Unofficial story
The major science theme of Wendy's career has been brain plasticity. However, Wendy's career can been subdivided into two distinct parts. The first part focused on identifying the cortical brain areas important for memory and then studying the neurophysiology of how these brain areas participate in new memory formation. This first half of Wendy's career proceeded in a very classic way with great advisors, great institutions, numerous grants and awards, teaching, administration and ultimately promotion. The second half of career started when Wendy started to ask not only how brain plasticity works in a respected well-studied animal model system, but how does it work in her own brain and what happens if she tried to stretch her own brain plasticity to explore those limits on a personal level. This started when she joined a gym to help loose the 25 pounds she gained as she worked to gain tenure. This regular exercise not only helped her get back in shape as well as loose those 25 pounds (along with some serious carb monitoring), but this made her notice how much physical activity seemed to not only improve her mood, but her memory (i.e. what she was studying in her own lab) as well as her focus. A quick look at the literature showed the growing number of studies supporting the neurobiology of what she was noticing in herself. This simple observation, set off an avalanche of changes in Wendy's personal and professional life that included, shifting her entire research program from the neurophysiology of memory in non-human primates to how physical aerobic exercise enhances brain function in humans, writing a book about that experience, giving 4 TEDX talks, one 2017 TEDWomen talk and countless other interviews and podcasts on the neuroscience of exercise in the human brain. Most recently (and on the actual 20th anniversary of her arrival in New York), Wendy debuted a science performance piece sponsored by the Simon's Foundation that seeks to pair scientists with theatre directors to create new ways of communicating science to the general public. Her first piece is called Memory's First Kiss and it debuted on January 15, 2018 at Caveat Theater/Science Nightclub. She is currently working on her second book and her second performance piece that will focus on the neuroscience of exercise on the brain.

Eero Simoncelli (Jan 12, 2018)

Official story
Eero received a BA in Physics from Harvard (1984), a Certificate of Advanced study in Math(s) from University of Cambridge (1986), and a MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT (1988/1993). He was an assistant professor in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania from 1993 to 1996, and then moved to NYU as an assistant professor of Neural Science and Mathematics (later adding Psychology, and most recently, Data Science). Eero received an NSF CAREER award in 1996, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 1998, and became an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2000. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2008, and an associate member of the Canadian institute for Advanced Research in 2010. He has received two Outstanding Faculty awards from the NYU GSAS Graduate Student Council (2003/2011), two IEEE Best Journal Article awards (2009/2010) and a Sustained Impact Paper award (2016), an Emmy Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for a method of measuring the perceptual quality of images (2015), and the Golden Brain Award from the Minerva Foundation, for fundamental contributions to visual neuroscience (2017). His group studies the representation and analysis of visual images in biological and machine systems.

Unofficial story
Eero was born in Philadelphia, and initiated a complicated relationship with educational institutions by withdrawing from pre-school after two weeks. His childhood was dominated by two activities: building and/or breaking things (model airplanes, furniture, electrical devices, lawn mowers, etc), and playing music (clarinet and tenor sax). He also was armtwisted into leading roles in a sequence of musical stage productions from 5th to 9th grades - despite his abysmal acting skills, and acute stage fright, the school was desperate for boys that could carry a tune. He's quite sure that these early stage experiences are the only reason he has survived the public speaking aspect of faculty life. In 9th grade, he read a Scientific American issue about the brain, and found himself fascinated by the concept that orchestrated electrical signals could enable thought. Two years later, Paul Rozin (a close family friend from the Penn Psychology Department) helped arrange a summer job in Randy Gallistel's lab. Implanting electrodes in rats and running experiments to determine the strength of their desire for simulated reward was a fascinating, but somewhat surreal experience (made more tangible by a tendency to faint at the sight of blood). The following year he spent the summer at the Tanglewood Young Artists Orchestral program, reconsidering whether music might make a better choice of profession. As a Harvard freshman, Eero signed up for Intro Bio, but was disappointed to find after two weeks that it was mostly focused on memorizing the names of things. He dropped the course, thereby eliminating the option of a biology major. Psychology didn't seem physical enough, and math too abstract. Goldilocks-like, he landed on physics. College went quickly, as if in a dream, but punctuated by trauma - a severe eye injury after freshman year left him legally blind in one eye; sophomore year brought a round of pneumonia after one too many all-nighters; junior year he was on the brink of dropping out five weeks into the term when he was unable to decide which of the 12 classes he'd signed up for he would officially take (one of many indecision crises). Graduation came, along with a fellowship for a year's study abroad, and Eero went off to Cambridge to learn more math, play even more music, and row on the Cam. He returned home abruptly when his mother became ill again, and she passed away just after Thanksgiving. He stayed home the rest of the year to help his father and sister (and himself) to come to grips with the permanance of the unexpected change. But trauma brought opportunity, and he was rescued (again by Paul Rozin), who helped him arrange a research job with Alan Gelperin, John Hopfield, and David Tank at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Princeton. After returning to Cambridge for another year, Eero headed to MIT, where he settled in as the only member of Ted Adelson's newly formed research group. Working with Ted in those early years was exhilerating, culminating in a master's degree, but followed immediately by a complete loss of direction and crisis in confidence. He took a leave of absence to take a contracting job at Fidelity Investments, which was just what was needed to provide perspective on the joys of academic freedom and scientific reasoning, as well as paying off a pile of student loans. Summers working with David Heeger at NASA Ames Research Center provided a welcome change in scenery and some outdoor life. Eero stepped directly from his PhD into a faculty job in computer science at Penn (literally, teaching his first class 3 days after his thesis defense). He floundered for 2 years (no grants, no publications, diffuse research plans, heavy teaching load), but did manage to get married and buy (and renovate) a house, just before being lured (by Tony Movshon and Mike Landy) into applying for a faculty position at CNS/NYU. Moving from an engineering department to a science department, and from his home town to "The City" seemed fraught with risks, but his wife convinced him otherwise, and he has been grateful ever since.

Emily Balcetis (Dec 8, 2017)

Official story
Emily holds a BA in Psychology and a BFA in Music Performance from University of Nebraska. She received her PhD in Social and Personality Psychology from Cornell University, working with David Dunning. She joined the faculty at Ohio University in 2006 and then New York University in 2009. Her research examines how motivations influence visual experience, in the service of self-regulation. She applies this approach to the investigation of health behavior, legal decision-making, relationships, and underrepresentation in leadership among other social problems. Emily has received prestigious early-career awards including the Federation of Association of Behavioral and Brain Sciences Early Career Impact Award, Society for Experimental and Social Psychology Dissertation of the Year Award, Sage Young Scholars Award, and the International Society for Self and Identity Early Career Award. She has received multiple grants from NSF to support her research, and she has been recognized for her teaching with NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award and Cornell's Clark Distinguished Teaching Award.

Unofficial story
Emily found her way to psychology after attempts at becoming a musician and rock star. Her pursuit resulted in middling achievement at best. She achieved her pinnacle success when playing an outdoor festival for 15,000 people with a major punk and rock band. But that mark came too early in her career and was followed by too many subsequent performances with marching bands in plume-covered hats and polyester suits to establish any real street cred. So she applied to graduate school in psychology instead. In the first few months of her PhD studies, Emily was already planning a very undeserved summer break in Europe, and trying to find ways to fund her anticipated 2-month travel. She designed a single study that coupled social psychology and visual perception, with the hopes of presenting the data in a poster at a vision science conference in Glasgow and winning a $500 travel grant from Cornell to defray the costs of her exploits. The study worked. The graduate school awarded the grant. And off Emily went. Upon her return, her much too accepting and open-minded graduate advisor suggested she conduct her research in consultation with the faculty at Cornell rather than in isolation and with only aspirations of one-off conference experiences - a suggestion that rightfully set her research on a much more theoretically rigorous course. That single study defined the next 20 years of Emily's research agenda and founded what is now her comprehensive examination of the pervasiveness of motivational biases in conscious and unconconscious visual perception and decision-making.

Cate Hartley (Nov 17, 2017)

Official story
Cate holds a BS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, where she did research in John Gabrieli's lab, working with Noam Sobel. She received her PhD in Psychology from New York University, working with Liz Phelps, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship with BJ Casey at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell Medical College. She joined the faculty at Weill Cornell in 2014 and recently returned to NYU as an Assistant Professor. Her research examines how emotional learning and decision-making change as the brain develops from childhood to adulthood. Cate has received prestigious early-career awards including the NARSAD Young Investigator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the APS Rising Stars Award, and the Klingenstein-Simons Neuroscience Fellowship.

Unofficial story
Cate chose her major after discovering that in her fairly aimless sampling of classes, she had completed half of the Symbolic Systems major. She was drawn to neuroscience and after many fruitless inquiries, found a graduate student willing to take her on as a research assistant. The cognitive neuroscience research happening in the Gabrieli lab was exciting to her, but she found no PhD programs that featured this sort of training. Instead of graduate school, she moved to New York to join a fledgling AI startup as a software engineer, having oversold them on her level of programming skills. Within the next two years, the company grew ten times larger and then went bankrupt, after which Cate joined a few former colleagues working on algorithmic financial market prediction. The soullessness of this work gradually drove Cate back toward academia, where she discovered that human cognitive neuroscience had flourished in her absence. Cate had her first child midway through grad school. He was a colicky baby who barely slept and screamed constantly for nearly five months straight. Cate's graduate advisor was remarkably tolerant of her astonishing lack of productivity and generally poor cognitive functioning. Cate barely managed to publish one empirical paper before defending her dissertation. She then had another baby, and started her postdoc uptown three months later, once again sleepless and addled. Cate spent far too much time in her postdoc tying up loose ends from grad school and failed at all her attempts to obtain postdoctoral funding. However, she managed to publish some papers, and on the merits of this work (and possibly a touch of academic nepotism) she was promoted to a faculty position at Weill Cornell. Since her move downtown to NYU, her most substantive accomplishment has been the 50% reduction in her commuting time.

Xavier Castellanos (Oct 20, 2017)

Official story
Xavier Castellanos studied Chomskian linguistics at Vassar College, experimental psychology at the University of New Orleans, and medicine at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. He was in the first cohort of "triple board" residents (combined training in pediatrics, psychiatry and child and adolescent psychiatry) at the University of Kentucky, after which he spent a decade conducting child psychiatry research at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda. In 2001 he moved to New York University, where he is endowed professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, professor of radiology, neuroscience and physiology and an affiliate member of the NYU department of psychology. His work has focused on using brain imaging to better understand neurodevelopmental disorders such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. He was an early advocate of examining low-frequency fluctuations in brain function and in behavior - both of which have become mainstream lines of investigation. Listed by Thomson Reuters as one the top 1% cited scientists in psychiatric neuroscience since 2014, he has served on many national and international review committees and was Vice-Chair of the American Psychiatric Association DSM-5 Workgroup on ADHD.

Unofficial story
Xavier Castellanos' parents were both Bolivian, but he was born in Madrid ... long story. Shortly before his third birthday, his high school graduate mother returned to Bolivia to raise her three children on her own, using her one outstanding ability - English fluency. She became a Spanish teacher at the U.S. Embassy inLa Paz, where one of her students encouraged her to emigrate to the U.S. She arrived in Washington D.C. in 1961, leaving Xavier and his younger siblings with their grandmother for a year. Immersion in English followed, including an unhappy year in a religious military boarding school. The next move was to New Orleans, where Xavier figured out how to talk football instead of academics with peers. The opportunity to skip English class one day led to a needs-based full scholarship to attend Vassar College, which had just begun to accept men. The transition from parochial rule-bound high school to a nearly rule-free liberal arts college was precarious at first. Fortunately, the second semester grade (in the full year English 101 course) covered the nearly disastrous procrastination of the first semester. A burned out Math ABD assistant professor (someone else published a proof of the theorem he had been working on for 7 years) introduced him to Chomsky and his revolution in linguistics. This, along with his desire to rekindle his Hispanic connection in the Vassar Wesleyan Semester in Madrid, became the focus of an independent major in linguistics. This culminated in a Chomskian analysis of reflexive verbs in Spanish which was fascinating but excruciatingly solitary work. On graduating, Xavier had no direction other than a vague desire to pursue further academic study, in anything other than linguistics. At the same time, Xavier's mother realized her current place of employment in New Orleans was about to close - money laundering by the director... another long story. Still at her day job, she dictated translations at night, with Xavier as the unpaid stenographer and secretarial staff. In exchange, at Xavier's suggestion, his mother wrote Jean Piaget, asking to translate one his books. He responded in a hand written letter - long since lost - referring her to his publishers. With his (implicit) recommendation, she negotiated a contract with D. Reidel Publishers, The Netherlands. Xavier and her young partner, who was fluent in French, but not in developmental psychology, spent the next year translating volume 23 of the Series on Genetic Epistemology into English: Psychology and Epistemology of Functions. Confronting inconsistencies in Piaget's use of terms (e.g., did he mean to differentiate scheme from schema, or did he forget he started with one and switched to the other?), Xavier sought consultation. The one local Piagetian, Anne Dean, connected Xavier with Piaget collaborator Hans Furth, her advisor. She also offered him graduate credit for his translation in the UNO psychology masters program and connected Xavier with Bob Porter, a psycholinguistics recently arrived from Haskins Labs. Bob was a dynamic enthusiastic professor and investigator who offered Xavier a research assistantship, even though Xavier had not formally joined the masters program. A year into the process, application became pro forma. Everything was on track for Xavier to go from UNO to UT Austin for a PhD in psycholinguistics, when Bob accepted a Fulbright to the Karolinska. Xavier continued to run the shadowing VCV experiment they eventually published, but in Bob's absence, the potential to participate in behavioral studies of endogenous opioids stimulated a change in advisors and focus. Castrating 150 rats for his masters thesis experiments (effects of absence of gonadal steroids on nociception) led Xavier to realize his talent/proclivity for improvisation was a poor fit for a career in basic science. He decided to consider medical school - provided he could make it through the organic chemistry hurdle. As a masters student, he was allowed to take classes at fill, and at no cost. He survived first semester orgo, and got the hang of it by the second semester. Once again, the second semester grade eclipsed the first. He negotiated to accelerate Inorganic, took Biology and Physics (full year for both) and prepared for the MCAT as if it were a marathon - which it is. His excellent scores were not enough to get him off the wait list at Hopkins - his first choice - but LSU in Shreveport was less choosy. LSU was as traditional a school as one could design, but it was also still highly subsidized by the state of Louisiana, which meant the student loans were minor. After 3.5 years of medical school, Xavier was once again undecided. Pediatrics, internal medicine, family medicine and neurology all seemed possibilities. The psychiatry program had been decidedly unimpressive - so that was off the list, until a classmate alerted him to a new program combining truncated (18 months each) general psychiatry, and child and adolescent psychiatry, with 24 months of pediatrics. Galvanized, Xavier applied to 4 of the 6 programs and was accepted at two. He chose the University of Kentucky largely because of the warmth of the director, Otto Kaak, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, who became Xavier's next father figure. Three and a half years later, Xavier was again uncertain about next steps. Joining the faculty in Lexington seemed possible, but Xavier's wife suggested he consider a research fellowship. He applied for programs at NYU, Columbia, and NIMH. Then and now, few physicians want to spend years as postdocs, so he had his choice, and the murder rate in New York was still on the upswing - so it was Bethesda, to work under Judy Rapoport. At NIMH, Xavier was hired for a project begun in 1985 and still using 1980's approaches of examining catecholamine metabolites in body fluids - blood, urine, and cerebrospinal fluid. These turned out to be modestly interesting, but a side project of MRI scanning the same children who were getting their metabolites measured during double-blind drug studies resulted in a small positive finding, which encouraged all to continue to expand the sample - and which provided unexpected job security. The pilot study turned into a major 25 year longitudinal effort which was only concluded when the GE 1.5 Tesla scanner was finally scrapped. Xavier and Jay Giedd had been inadvertently given permanent NIH positions - they were the first to be converted from post-docs to staff scientists. Jay stayed another decade, but Xavier attended a meeting in NY in 1999 that convinced him to investigate extremely low frequency fluctuations in the brain. These were initially reported in basal ganglia neuronal firing rates by Judie Walters - who first identified dopamine neurons by their electrophysiology. Xavier wondered if such fluctuations might account for the inconsistencies which characterize ADHD, but Judy Rapoport did not share his enthusiasm, and she reminded him that he was not yet scientifically independent. After some prolonged back and forth, she finally said, "you might be right, but I don't understand it, and I can't defend it." Thus, when NYU was recruiting for someone to launch imaging studies in child psychiatry, Xavier's only question was about scientific independence, which was assured, along with substantial philanthropic support. A high-risk/high-reward effort to use near-infrared spectroscopic (NIRS) imaging was funded by a foundation - and the effort failed. The prototype instrument was too unwieldy to be used with children. Fortunately, the frequency-domain analytical methods Xavier's post-doc learned in the process of trying to make NIRS work transferred to response time time-series. This provided the first evidence that fluctuations in response times overlap those in BOLD in the frequencies which characterize the default and other intrinsic connectivity networks. Recruiting Mike Milham to do his residency in general and child/adolescent psychiatry at NYU was the next key step. Mike had obtained his MD/PhD at Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and he was eager to continue developing scientifically while training in psychiatry. Xavier was able to design a program of "scientific moonlighting" through which Mike established a functional imaging program during nights and weekends - and through numerous texts during regular hours. Repurposed task-based fMRI data analyzed by Mike confirmed the existence of task-negative (default) and task-positive networks, regardless of the age or diagnosis of the participants. The group shifted completely from NIRS to fMRI and began to collect pilot resting state scans on the CBI Allegra. Confronting widespread skepticism, Xavier and Mike wrote numerous grant applications - most of them to NIH. Fortunately, a pilot study with n=20/group including controls from Craigslist showed an interesting result. Its novelty and the hard lessons learned in the 9 submissions of a prior paper (Kelly et al. 2008; 3 strikes at Nat Neurosci, 3 at J Neurosci, and third submission accepted at Neuroimage) resulted in an acceptance by Biological Psychiatry 4 days before the first NIH grant was resubmitted. Unexpectedly, all of those early grants were funded - most on second submissions (there were 3 in those days) - resulting in the good problem of too much funding, too fast. The lab exploded, with recruits from Beijing, Dublin, Leuven, UCLA... Resting state exploded as a method and we joined the bandwagon. Our major methodological contributions were in response to Don Klein's insistence that we address test-retest reliability, which turned out to be mostly adequate, although some of that reliability probably reflects head motion... but the story continues and it's not all artifact. Our major cultural innovation was to vigorously champion open data sharing. In the process, one formerly too-large lab has become a constellation of labs, a dizzying series of Brain Hack events, Neuro Bureau parties and Brain Art Competitions all infused with a global camaraderie. It continues to be a wonderful ride - impossible to predict at the outset, and beyond all expectations.

Michael Purugganan (Sep 15, 2017)

Official story
Michael did his undergraduate studies at the University of the Philippines, graduating with a degree in Chemistry in 1985. He moved to the United States, earning an M.A. in Chemistry at Columbia, and then a Ph.D. in Botany with a minor in Global Policy at the University of Georgia in 1993 at the laboratory of Susan Wessler. He was awarded an Alfred Sloan Postdoctoral Fellowship in Molecular Evolution, which he used to further his postdoctoral training at the University of California in San Diego. In 1996, he joined the faculty of Genetics at North Carolina State University, where he obtained tenure in 2001 and was named William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor in Genetics in 2005. In 2006, he moved to the NYU Center for Genomics and Systems Biology (CGSB) as the Dorothy Schiff Professor of Genomics. He was director of CGSB from 2010-2012, and in 2012 was named Dean for Science of the Faculty of Arts and Science. In 2015 he was named as a Silver Professor at NYU. Michael has won numerous awards, including being named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2005 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2006. In 2016, he was named a Global Chair Professor at the University of Bath in the UK. He is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Molecular Biology and Evolution, Genome Biology and Evolution, and Trends in Plant Sciences. He is also a Trustee of the Alfred Sloan Foundation, and was a past member of the Council of Scientists of the Human Frontiers Science Program and the Biological Sciences Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation.

Unofficial story
Michael had an early interest in both science and journalism, so he studied chemistry in college but pursued journalism on the side as an editor of the college newspaper and as a freelancer. He is most proud of his coverage of the aftermath of the 1983 assassination of Sen. Benigno Aquino, which eventually led to the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. In 1984 he was asked to join the Associated Press Manila Bureau as a full-time reporter, but turned it down to continue his college studies in chemistry. He graduated with a B.S. in chemistry with a B/B- average. His low grades did not prevent him from moving to Columbia University in 1985 to pursue a Ph.D. in Chemistry. Although he wrote a first-author paper in Science, passed all the exams and was "all but dissertation", he realized early on he was not that interested in chemistry. He decided instead to leave it all behind and move to a Ph.D. program in plant genetics and molecular biology based almost solely on an interview he read in Omni magazine. Accepted to Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, he nevertheless chose to move to the University of Georgia (UGA) to work specifically for a young assistant professor named Sue Wessler. He had a rocky 5 years as a Ph.D. student, joining a botany graduate program when the only thing he really knew about plants was they had chlorophyll, and hampered with mediocre bench skills. The only saving grace he had was being a voracious reader about everything in biology, and an ability to see connections between very different areas in science. During his stay at UGA, at the age of 28, he finally realized he was most passionately interested in evolution, and so wrote his dissertation on the evolution of transposable elements in 1993. Winning one of 5 slots for a Sloan fellowship in molecular evolution, he went to the University of California in San Diego to work on the then new and exciting area of evolution of development in plants. His two-year postdoc was unproductive on paper (he wrote only 1 research article), but was important as he used the time to ponder his future in scientific research. Michael hit the faculty job market in 1994/1995 because his visa was running out, and got 3 interviews. He only got one offer, at a salary that was 20% lower than his peers, a start-up package of $50,000 and a windowless laboratory space and office that could fit maybe 4 people. He nevertheless benefited from joining a department that was a world leader in quantitative and population genetics, and this helped solidify the course of his research program. Although his first 2 grants proposals were declined (at which point he thought his career was over), he managed the next year to get 3 small grants which he nursed for the next few years to establish the foundation of his work in plant evolutionary genetics. Those early years as a faculty member proved to be the most intellectually important years in his career, where he integrated the study of functional and evolutionary genetics and helped establish the modern study of plant evolutionary genetics. In 1999, while still an assistant professor, he became PI of a multimillion-dollar inter-institutional grant, and since then, he has largely been funded by large collaborative grants. He was recruited to NYU in 2006, the result of a fluke that came about because the NYU biology chair sat next to his Ph.D. adviser at a talk he was giving in the National Academy of Science. Michael has managed to lead a vigorous research program for 21 years, but nevertheless he still occasionally wakes up from a dream that he never submitted his undergraduate thesis and so did not actually get a B.S. degree.

Friederike Schuur (July 21, 2017)

Official story
Friederike started a PhD degree in 2008 in Cognitive Neurosience at the ICN (UCL), with degrees in cognitive science and philosophy, researching free will. Inevitably, she concluded that neuroscience is not well suited to solve philosophical questions. She turned to neurophysiology and studied motor preparation under risk and uncertainty using TMS alongside TMS' (+EEG, +fMRI) early pioneers (she still finished within three years). She decided to forgo the 2nd PhD degree in philosophy she was offered (twice, at LSE and Groningen University) and came to NYU as a postdoc. While in NYC, she volunteered for data science nonprofit DataKind and, eager to help change people's lives for the better, left academia, was an early Insight Data Science Fellow, and one of the first data scientist at Oscar Health Insurance, a startup born out of the Afforcable Healthcare Act (ACA). She was one of the first to model the consequences of the ACA, and enjoyed being part of a quickly growing billion $ valuation unicorn startup with Karlie Kloss and Ashton Kutcher stopping by. She went on to join a boutique machine learning research and advising company founded by Hilary Mason, a former machine learning professor of data science fame. She now works on applied machine learning problems and advises technical teams at Fortune 1000 companies, from data strategy to technical implementation. She is a frequent public speaker and writer, she continues to volunteer for DataKind and advises the digital innovation unit of the US division of UNRefugees.

Unofficial story
Friederike got her first job when she was 8 years old as an opera singer in her small German hometown, a job she kept till she graduated high school (wigs are fun). After high school, she moved to The Netherlands not knowing a word of Dutch to study cognitive science, a degree taught in Dutch. She started a second, full time degree in philosophy, lived in a squat, and ran a soup kitchen. A chance internship at the ICN (UCL) gave her a taste of big science and big cities. She could not believe when she was ranked top of her applicant pool and was given a prestigious grant to study neuroscience at UCL (she still wonders if she succumbed to reputation and did not pursue her real passion at the time, philosophy). Disillusionment with science set in during her NYU postdoc, she was looking for a personally more rewarding career with clear impact (and eager to escape competitiveness and other shenanigans). She volunteered for DataKind to try out data science. During a time of upheaval in her lab, when she found herself chased by US Immigrations, she took the plunge and started her career in data science and machine learning. She has endured bro-culture, experienced venture capitalist (VC) entitlement, and would seriously consider turning down a job if they offered daily free lunch. She enjoys that her current career allows her to reinvent herself whenever she wants. She enjoys being surrounded by smart people of varying experiences and educational backgrounds. She still does not know who she wants to be when she grows up. She has learned that optimizing life for happiness is a good deal harder than external approval.

Deepna Devkar (July 21, 2017)

Official story
Deepna received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, Texas in 2014. A month later, she joined Clayton Curtis' lab in NYU's Center for Neural Science and Psychology for a postdoctoral fellowship. Seven months into the fellowship, she decided to leave academia to pursue a career in Data Science. She was accepted into the 8-week Insight Data Science Fellowship in Data Science. A week later, she received her first job as a Data Scientist at Viacom, a media beast that owns 16 network brands, including Comedy Central, MTV, VH1, Spike, BET, and Nickelodeon. While at Viacom, she enjoyed working with fun data and informing the business decisions of chief media executives. She is now the Director of Data Science at Dotdash (formerly About.com), working across many teams on a variety of interesting problems, managing a team of 3 data scientists, and (shameless plug) looking to hire two more.

Unofficial story
Deepna grew up in a small town in West India exhibiting all characteristics of an only child, fitting all stereotypes of an Indian kid: obedient daughter, star student, teacher's pet, addicted bookworm, social conformist, and a spelling bee champion with aspirations of becoming a medical doctor. When she was 13, she moved to Texas with her parents, who quickly started pursuing the American dream, while she struggled through a major culture shock. Over the next decade, she discovered that human behavior was more interesting (and less nauseating) to study than the human body. After three degrees dedicated towards research in Psychology/Neuroscience (B.S., M.S., & Ph.D.), she graduated with many accolades, research awards and conference talks, and only 1 first-author paper, 'In Submission', to show for. Several excuses ensued; one of which was terrible choices of disillusioned advisors. Weiji adopted her in times of much desperation and became a mentor, also advising her to finally cut the umbilical cord from Texas and move to NYC for a postdoc fellowship at NYU (his most convincing argument: "All cool people eventually move to the Northeast."). The security was short-lived. As she witnessed her academic heroes scrambling around for grants, terrifying reality checks began to creep in. The big city had also planted bigger dreams. Some serious introspection (many thoughts to share here), much support from her predecessors, and a lot of luck led her to data science - a field she didn't even know existed a year before she plunged for it. A couple years in, she still gets to work on a variety of fun, challenging problems with smart people (a mini-lab of ex-academics actually) and enjoys the ability to make tangible impact on a quick time scale. The lifelong impostor syndrome is still alive, although makes less frequent appearances now. During day-to-day work crises (#firstworldjobproblems), she finds solace in the fact that at least she never has to write a grant again. Unlike some of her colleagues, she does not regret her academic life. When she retires from the "real world", she secretly hopes to return to academia to teach whatever she has learned. For now, she welcomes all opportunities to convince a fellow despondent academic that there is a world out there, where 95% of us have gone to and found happiness and decent success - it's still called the "alternative-career" world.

Liz Phelps (June 23, 2017)

Official story
Liz earned her BA in Psychology and Philosophy from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1984, where she was also a 3-time All-American in the Heptathalon. She chose Princeton for graduate school in Cognitive Psychology, but the summer prior to graduate school she got an internship to study brain-injured patients, which inspired her to also study neuroscience. This internship was arranged by the late George Miller, who is credited with founding the field of Cognitive Science, and later with Mike Gazzaniga, the field of Cognitive Neuroscience. At Princeton, Liz studied memory in amnesic patients with Bill Hirst and Marcia Johnson, combining her interests in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. After graduating in 1989, she did a post-doctoral fellowship with Mike Gazzaniga at Dartmouth, followed by one with Joe LeDoux at NYU, which marked the beginning of her studies of emotion and memory. In 1992, Liz accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at Yale University, and in 1999 she returned to NYU as an Associate Professor of Psychology. Today, Liz is the Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU.

Unofficial story
Although both of Liz's parents are scientists, Liz was never really interested in science growing up and thought her parents were geeks (they are!). Liz was very athletic and also pretty social when she was young, and when it came time to pick a college she did not give it much thought and decided to follow her then-boyfriend to Ohio Wesleyan. Not knowing what she wanted to do, she stumbled into a philosophy class and found she really enjoyed thinking about philosophical questions, such as nature of knowledge or free will, but she was always frustrated when class was over because there were never any answers, only more questions! She also took psychology and found that some of questions were the same, but psychologists did research and tried to find answers. Liz then had to admit to her geeky parents that she, too, may be a scientist. Liz went to Princeton to study memory in amnesic patients with Bill Hirst. During graduate school, Liz travelled thousands of miles testing amnesic patients in their homes, both to make it easier for them and also because they would often forget to show up for appointments. After her second year in graduate school, Liz'''s advisor did not get tenure and left. Around the same time, Marcia Johnson joined the Princeton faculty, so Liz continued in her lab for a year, until she left for a sabbatical. Her fourth year of graduate school, Liz moved to NYC where Bill Hirst was a now faculty member at the New School. She finished her PhD in New York, occasionally commuting to Princeton. Being somewhat social, Liz loved living in NYC, so when Mike Gazzaniga offered her a post-doc at Dartmouth, she was wary about moving to such a small town. Mike told her she should try it for 6 months and if she hated it she could leave. And she did, even though she loved working with Mike. She didn't have a job and came back to NYC, where Bill Hirst let her hang out in his lab and pretend she had a job, and Mike let her continue some projects from afar. She occasionally did temp work to make money. Around this time, the James S. McDonnell Foundation offered fellowships to allow young scholars cross-training in the sub-disciplines that make up cognitive neuroscience. Liz applied for one to work with Joe LeDoux and get more training in neuroscience, in hopes of studying the amygdala and emotional memory in humans. She got it on her second try. Liz, however, was completely naïve about how hard it was to study the human amygdala before fMRI and did not have any success while in Joe's lab, although she did take all the first-year graduate neuroscience classes and learned a lot. After a year in Joe's lab, Liz took the job at Yale where she finally had the resources she needed to study the human amygdala and she was able to make her collaboration with Joe a success that has continued to this day.

Richard Tsien (March 24, 2017)

Official story
Richard Tsien was born in China, came to the U.S. before he was 2, grew up in the NYC area during the Sputnik era and graduated from MIT with a bachelor's and master's degree in Electrical Engineering. He spent 4 years in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and junior research fellow, graduating with a D.Phil. in Biophysics and focusing on the ionic basis of cardiac action potentials. Skipping the postdoc stage to avoid the Vietnam war draft, he joined the faculty at Yale where he rose to full Professor. He switched from cardiac electrophysiology to neuronal biophysics in 1985-1988 and from Yale to Stanford, where he founded a new Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology from the ground up. He spent 23 yr at Stanford, co-directing a pan-Neuroscience organization, before moving to NYU in 2011 to start the Neuroscience Institute with colleagues at the Med Center. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was awarded the Axelrod and Gerard Prizes of SfN.

Unofficial story
RWT and his family went through immigrant family struggles during the McCarthy era. He tried to assimilate and was not particularly hardworking as a high school student. That changed at MIT - engineering was mostly theoretical and wonderfully taught. Still, studying was balanced with sports (crew, wrestling) and student politics. Entry into biology in England was not a personal epiphany but the result of persistent proselytizing by a friend, Robert Macdonald, now chair of Neurology at Vanderbilt. Working on the brain became the goal in Oxford, but Denis Noble, RWT's chosen advisor, was focused on heart and RWT (so easily distracted) joined him for cardiac experimentation and a book on cable theory with Julian Jack. The only sign of the future neuroscientist was a pop essay about understanding vision, inspired by ideas of Rene Descartes. Parts of RWT's thesis were pioneering but another aspect was wrong in a major way -- a traumatic experience. Early on at Yale, RWT was experimenting solo, slow to get his lab started and late to publish although on target about the importance of neuromodulation. His first paper, in Nature New Biology, involved conflict about authorship with a senior colleague that seems silly now but was very awkward then. One of his lab's major discoveries, of the calcium channels that support neurotransmission, was highly controversial - not the last of scientific disputes. RWT had a good relationship with his late brother RYT of GFP fame - collaborations helped. RWT has always enjoyed asking questions but quickly became aware of how annoying they can be to some in the audience. Teaching and mentoring has always been a joy. In the first part of his career, RWT behaved like his competitive father, but the balance has tipped to taking after his altruistic and socially conscious mother, who never forgot her experience of being given away as a young girl in a highly male chauvinist Chinese society. Balancing the inborn desire to be best and first vs. the aspiration to be kind and helpful remains an issue but mom is winning. The move to NYU has provided new challenges and sources of happiness to help keep gloom and doom at bay. It helps to be married to a psychologist who loves NYC and close by two adult kids who live in Manhattan and work in Brooklyn or vice-versa.

Wei Ji Ma (March 3, 2017)

Video recording 1 (CNS, 2017) | Video recording 2 (Penn MindCore, 2019) | Video recording 3 (CoSyNe conference, 2020) | Video recording 4 (NeuroMatch, 2020)

Official story
Weiji received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He went on to do postdocs in computational neuroscience with Christof Koch at Caltech and with Alex Pouget at the University of Rochester. He was Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine from 2008 to 2013, and has been Associate Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at NYU since. His research focuses on perceptual and cognitive decision-making under uncertainty.

Unofficial story
Weiji is a third-generation Dutch whose mom was simultaneously a stereotypical Chinese "tiger parent" and a former 1960s student activist in Amsterdam. Weiji had a bizarre childhood, graduating from high school at age 14 and from college at 17, along the way picking up media appearances, deficits in social skills, and an inflated self-image. His confidence came crashing down in his PhD, which was initially misguided (poor advisor) and eventually simply too hard (string theory). He was leaning heavily on a fellow grad student and his PhD never felt his own. Weiji was also very distracted, often spending more time being active in organizations than on research. He never ever thought he would make it to faculty. He considered alternative careers but decided to give science one more chance. Starting as a postdoc offered new opportunities for delusions of grandeur: he claimed he would solve consciousness using statistical physics. Back on Earth, Weiji published only one book chapter with Christof Koch, and in 2004, Christof had no choice but to kick him out of his lab. Only in his second postdoc, under Alex Pouget's whip, did he start to get his act together, but this was also a time when, working besides a talented fellow postdoc, impostor complex hit hard. Weiji got his faculty job thanks to just enough people seeing promise in the absence of accomplishments. His procrastination is still alive and kicking to this day, but since his students and postdocs now do the actual work, he can get away with it.

Michael Landy (October 4, 2016)

Official story
Michael Landy received a B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia in 1974 and a Ph.D. in Computer and Communication Sciences from Michigan in 1981. At Michigan he worked with John Holland, the great popularizer of genetic algorithms. Holland was also a co-author on one of the earliest simulations of a neural net (Rochester, Holland, Haibt and Duda, 1956) that attempted to simulate the cell-assembly theory of Donald Hebb. Michael was also inspired by Hebb's book, and his dissertation was an updated attempt to simulate cell-assembly theory in response to visual stimuli. Landy then moved to NYU as a programmer and then postdoc, becoming a faculty member in 1984, where he has remained ever since. Since 1996 he has been the Coordinator of the Program in Cognition & Perception (except during the occasional sabbatical).

Unofficial story
Michael skipped a bunch of grades, mainly because he was good at math tests and became totally disruptive when bored in class (that arrogance apparently continues to this day; just look at his RateMyProfessor page). At the age of 14, his big brother and father decided it was time for Mikey to go to college (and avoid moving to Phoenix with his Mom). Needless to say, they didn't consult Mom. He skipped school and hitchhiked to neighboring Princeton to ask whether they would admit him, but admissions was over by then and they blew him off. Luckily, his father had a personal connection with the dean at Columbia and he was granted late acceptance to the engineering school. At Columbia, he went into computer science because he had been playing with the computers in his high school, which he had to himself since no one else there knew how to use them. Columbia decided to use his youth for marketing, leading to a bunch of annoying interviews and press, and some odd fan mail. One long-forgotten (and ignored) letter surfaced recently from a bag of memorabilia in the back of a closet: a letter inviting him to study under a certain R. E. Kalman. Pushing through undergraduate studies in 3 years, Michael arrived in Ann Arbor, away from family, at the ripe old age of 17. Needless to say, he wasn't remotely focused on his graduate studies. Rather, he hung out with undergraduates and did all the things that undergraduates did in those years (enough said). He spent much more of his time doing music-related things (as a DJ on the college station, putting on jazz concerts as a lighting person, sound person and promoter, and picking up jazz flute as an instrument) than he did on his thesis (that, fortunately, involved computer simulations that ran for a month straight before there was any analysis to do). His move to NYU was through random personal connections and was made so he could continue his flute studies with a teacher here. He only got the faculty position at NYU because the job wasn't filled the previous year by another protege of his boss. A major dispute with another professor almost led to a failure to make tenure; his tenure case was saved only when friendly colleagues interceded.

Jayeeta Basu (May 20, 2016)

Official story
Between 1999-2002, Jayeeta went to Presidency College, Calcutta one of the country's oldest institutions of western education, to earn her bachelors degree in Physiology. In 2004, she got a Masters in Neuroscience at Georg August University, Göttingen, Germany under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Dr. Erwin Neher and Dr. Christian Rosenmund. Jayeeta's PhD from Baylor College of Medicine, Houston with Christian Rosenmund focused on molecular mechanisms of synaptic vesicle release. In 2007, Jayeeta started her postdoc with Dr. Steven Siegelbaum at Columbia University and worked on inhibitory circuitry and their role in plasticity, learning and memory. She has been running her lab at the NYU Neuroscience Institute since January 2015.

Unofficial story
In college, Jayeeta was heavily involved in politics, holding an elected office for the Independents Consolidation party on campus. She spent a lot of her college days writing for local newspapers about neuroscience, academia and discussing politics and the environment. 6 months into her PhD, Jayeeta's PhD advisor decided to move the lab from Germany to Baylor College of Medicine Houston. She was encouraged by the program to switch labs but decided against their advice. She transferred to the Baylor College of Medicine and got her PhD from there in 2007. The first year of Jayeeta's post-doc was extremely difficult as her first project failed, she couldn't reproduce her predecessor's data, and her mentor wouldn't believe her results. Eventually Jayeeta was able to prove her results and take the project in a completely different direction. In 2014, when Jayeeta was almost about to accept a faculty position in the pacific northwest, Gord gave a talk at Columbia and at the post-doc student lunch asked Jayeeta to apply to NYU.

Chiye Aoki (April 29, 2016)

Official story
Chiye majored in biology at Barnard College, the women's college of Columbia University. During the summer of her junior and senior year, she volunteered in the lab of Jonathan Winson at Rockefeller University, where she was introduced to physiological recordings of the hippocampus of awake and sleeping animals. A week after graduation, she began working as the sole research technician to Jonathan Winson. The next year, she was admitted to Rockefeller's PhD program. It took six years to earn a PhD, working in Phil Siekevitz's laboratory of cell biology and investigating the neurochemical basis of the critical period for visual cortical plasticity. She did a 3-year post-doctoral training in the laboratory of Virginia Pickel at Cornell University Medical College, where she learned electron microscopy and, paradoxically, about non-synaptic modes of neuronal communication. She became a research assistant professor there, and after two years, got the job at the CNS. It was the only place to which she applied for a faculty job. She was promoted to full professor in 2004.

Unofficial story
Chiye was born in East LA, grew up there, then in Tokyo and New York. She lost/gained and regained her native tongue, which led her to wonder about brain plasticity. Most recently, after witnessing profound changes upon her children during adolescence, she has started studying plasticity of adolescent brains. Graduate school educated Chiye in many topics that were not on official playbook. She witnessed half of her cell biology department burn up in flames and with it, see young scientists' careers go down the drain. As she was pushing to finish her last set of experiments, her experiments stopped working. For those 6 months, she seriously doubted if she would ever graduate. She learned that famous, highly accomplished scientists are not necessarily the best mentors. She witnessed another highly accomplished, moral and compassionate scientist (her PhD adviser) lose to others, due to an unspoken handicap. She saw a lab get turned upside down due to suspected fraudulence and another neuroscientist's career become torn up by animal rights activists. Her female role models were unmarried and childless. For the job interview at the CNS, she carefully prepared her declaration speech about how she intended to have children (eventually), and that this was only fair, seeing how the male professors at the CNS were having children. This was met with a 'Oh, sure,' and a smile. On the other hand, she has seen female post-docs and students from her lab take alternative paths, due to incompatibility with motherhood. Chiye has faced many rejections of manuscripts and many, many declines of grant proposals, but feels lucky to have had just enough of them accepted at the right time to enable her to continue pursuing her passion. The most miraculous and joyous moments revolved parenthood but the most heart-wrenching moments that made her feel the most vulnerable and challenged also revolved parenthood. In those difficult times, the career of science and life around the lab provided the steady source of creativity, energy and joy. Conversely, when grants were denied and papers were rejected, the steady source of love and support from the family kept her going. People ask her how one should balance work with life. Chiye's advice is: listen to your gut feelings, especially about bad mentors and scientific questions, seek and promote physically and mentally healthy work environments, realize that no matter how passionate you are about work, it needs to be balanced with additional personal needs, so set aside time for them.

Nathaniel Daw (February 19, 2016)

Official story
In 1992, Nathaniel Daw received a BA summa cum laude from Columbia University. In 2003, he received his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University working with David Touretzky on computational models of the dopamine system. He joined NYU's Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology as an assistant professor in 2007, following a postdoc at the Gatbsy Computational Neuroscience with Peter Dayan. He received tenure in 2012 and moved to Princeton University's psychology department and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute as a full professor in 2015.

Unofficial story
Nathaniel's chief and perhaps only honor in college was winning a bad poetry contest by spraying a copy of Kant's Foundations for the Metaphysics of Morals with Lysol. After a miserable year working in the real world, Nathaniel went to graduate school mainly because he was hopeless at actual professional responsibilities but good at taking classes; he was totally oblivious to the whole research thing. He took that position over an alternative opportunity, which was writing software to price mortgage backed securities in the World Trade Center, thereby dodging two bullets at once. A surprising number of his PhD cohort were among the first 50 employees at Google, but all Nathaniel got out of Google recruiting during that period was a pair of "I'm Feeling Lucky" boxer shorts. Having moved to the suburbs and quickly exhausted the Netflix catalog and the combinatoric possibilities of Domino's pizza toppings, he slinks back to NYU this afternoon cap in hand, twitching and begging for his former position or at least some half-decent takeaway.

Jay van Bavel (November 20, 2015)

Official story
In 2002, Jay Van Bavel received his B.A. in psychology from the University of Alberta. In 2008, Jay received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Toronto, working with Wil Cunningham. He studied as a postdoctoral fellow with Julian Thayer at The Ohio State University. In 2010, Jay began work as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at NYU. Jay has received a number of awards, including the Young Investigator Award from the Society for Social Neuroscience, the SAGE Young Scholars Award, and the Janet Taylor Spence Early Career Award from the Association for Psychological Science.

Unofficial story
After giving up on his dream to become a professional hockey player, Jay became the first person in his family to graduate from college. He even didn't realize until his third year of his B.A. that research was conducted at universities (despite attending the third largest research university in the country). After his first year of graduate school in Toronto, Jay's advisor tragically passed away and he was orphaned until Wil Cunningham adopted him. A year later, Wil was poached by Ohio State University and Jay moved to Columbus as a visiting scholar. Jay completed most of his Ph.D. requirements (orals, proposal, etc) in the hotel lobby during the annual SPSP convention. In his first year as a faculty member, Jay had ten papers and three grants rejected, and zero publications.

David Poeppel (Dec 19, 2014)

Official story
David is the Director of the Department of Neuroscience at the Max-Planck-Institute (MPIEA) in Frankfurt, Germany and a Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU. Trained at MIT in cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience, he did his post-doctoral training at the University of California San Francisco, where he focused on functional brain imaging. Until 2008, he was a professor at the University of Maryland College Park, where he ran the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language laboratory. He has been a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Studies Berlin), the American Academy Berlin, and a guest professor at numerous institutions. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His research focuses on the brain basis of hearing, speech, language, and music, using a range of experimental approaches. He has published over 200 papers and chapters and lectures frequently on topics ranging from hearing to language processing to the conceptual foundations of cognition and neurobiology.

Unofficial story
In elementary school (in Cambridge, Massachusetts) and in high school (Gymnasium in München, Germany), David was quite good at sports and disruptive behavior, but quite mediocre at schoolwork. Under the (often contradictory) influence of his Venezuelan mother and German father, he got through high school - but without a clear intuition what to do next. After fleeing Germany for the US and floundering for a year or two, he started to study a not-entirely-coherent mixture of philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience at MIT. However, his true passion was in other areas: acting and directing. He appeared in a number of plays and directed a few, as well. He toyed very seriously with the idea of pursuing this line of work, because he had great fun in that milieu and did not feel impostorish - but somehow the plan was derailed. After working in a monkey lab for a while (with Peter Schiller and Nikos Logothetis at MIT) and, crucially, after attending a bunch of lectures by Noam Chomsky on linguistics and cognitive science (which felt like a curtain was opened and a new intellectual vista presented), he ended up in graduate school at MIT. The cohort he was with in graduate school - as well as the faculty - were profoundly intimidating. They became good friends and colleagues, but the feeling of inadequacy never went away. The solution was to put one foot in front of the other and pursue projects and positions that were modest and manageable. David picked topics that were conceptually controversial but did not require great technical facility (which he lacks). Two of the projects he worked on as a Ph.D. student led to papers that were discussed and criticized a lot, which had both good (recognition and job offers) and bad (reputation as cranky and dogmatic) consequences. This ultimately led to a weird couple of years as post-doc at UCSF, where he ended up not having a PI in charge (unexpected PI move) and had to become the architect of his own research program, and his own undoing. As an assistant, associate, and full professor at the University of Maryland College Park, he finally learned three key things. First, it's OK not to be the smartest person in the room. It's liberating to admit ignorance and not feel embarrassed. Second, be a closer. Finish your projects and papers and grants at a decent pace. Third, hire people that are really nice (most important criterion), dedicated, have a sense of humor, and are smarter than you (in some clear way). After 8 or so years, David and his wife and three sons moved to New York City, which is more exciting than suburban Washington DC. The colleagues at NYU were and are as intimidating as the folks from MIT, but David didn't care anymore - he had finally learned that he was good at some things and lousy at others, and that's OK... Of the work that he has produced, there are 10 or so papers that he is genuinely proud of over the course of his career. What has given him the most professional pleasure is the group of graduate students and post-docs that he has had the pleasure to work with over the years. He is acutely aware of the fact - in large part based on pervasive and long lasting impostor syndrome - that his professional success derives almost entirely from their originality, creativity, hard work, and the generation of a truly fun, funny, and productive work environment.